Bug#860950: steam: crashes on startup

[Simon McVittie]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2018 at 17:13:42 +0800, Clayton wrote:
> Finally had a chance to do a clean install on a 32-bit machine, and got
> farther than ever before on that platform, which suggests the original
> cause of this bug report has been overcome by events.

I think it can probably be closed, then?

> 	"Linux
> 
> 	32-bit Linux distributions are also no longer supported. Please
> 	install a 64-bit Linux distribution to make use of the Steam
> 	browser."
> 
> This sounds to me like it might be the end of the road for Steam on
> 32-bit.

Because the Steam client is a 32-bit binary with 32-bit dependencies, we
have to distribute it as steam:i386 anyway - otherwise its dependencies
on libraries like libGL wouldn't work correctly.

If the embedded web browser (a separate process, I think) doesn't work
on a pure i386 system but only on an amd64 + i386 multiarch system,
then that isn't really something we can fix. If I remember correctly
from using Windows Steam under Wine at a time when Wine failed to run
the embedded web browser, the Steam client can work enough without its
web browser to log in (during startup) and install and run games that
were bought by using a different web browser or a different machine,
as long as those games are themselves 32-bit; so I think "works with
severely degraded functionality" would be a reasonable summary?

    smcv