On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 11:28 AM, Christian Schaller <cschalle(a)redhat.com>
wrote:
While most desktop applications have migrated to 64 bit at this
point
there are
still many that hasn't. Steam for instance is still 32-bit afaict. So
doing a clean
cutover like this feel a bit to drastic to me and I am not sure we have
the market power
to 'force' vendors to quickly migrate to containers.
Christian
I would go further and say that I'm almost certain Fedora does not have the
market power to accomplish this at the moment. Perhaps we could
*eventually* get major software vendors to migrate to containers but I'm
pretty sure there would be a period where at least some major proprietary
desktop applications are broken.
Speaking from an end-user perspective, I actually really like the way
multilib on Fedora is currently implemented. All I need to do to get a
32-bit application-- be it some Windows application under wine, some
proprietary application like Steam, etc.-- to work is to install the 32-bit
packages via yum/dnf, and then things Just Work.
I understand that from a building-the-distribution perspective the way this
is done currently is kind of a hack, but I can't help but notice that the
*only* benefits to this proposal would be that it makes building the
distribution easier. There are no proposed benefits for our users beyond
breaking the way things currently work with probably no upgrade path. And
whether we like it or not, users, myself included, install nonfree software
like Steam on systems and generally expect it to continue working from
release to release.
Ben Rosser