Steam is kind of junk if you look into how it actually works

Value needs to get its stuff together

What gaslight?

Containerizing the 2038 problem won't fix 32 bit issues that need recompilations.

Have you set your devices to 2038 and reported the issues your distro needs fixed?

Being able to run on everything is nice, but what you're actually asking for here is for a highly skilled (and rare) distro maintainer to dedicate substantial amounts of time to maintaining and testing thousands of packages on 32 bit systems in case someone wants to use it. It's not just like users get to click a button and voila, they can run more games than before.

If you really need to use 32 bit software, eventually you'll just have to manage it yourself because no one else is able to do it for you. That capability will almost never go away.

There are and will always be distros optimized for running on everything. Fedora is a "move fast" distro, it's hard to move fast with a lot of baggage.

Is dropping support for 32bit hardware more important than being able to run on everything?

Yes evidently, because they dropped that hardware support in 2019. Specifically they dropped 32-bit x86 kernels in Fedora 31

I think the last time I had a 32 bit CPU was around 2005 but I could be remembering that incorrectly. Supporting 20 year old hardware isn't always easy.

Fedora is usually the first to pioneer something

By that logic we should never remove anything legacy ever. It don't work like that.

Userspace is allowed to break themselves

Don’t break userspace.

That's a kernel saying. A bit unfitting to repeat it for the distro that builds said userspace.

And they broke A LOT of software along the way.

I don't think Apple is concerned with making every app and game work on their systems to the same degree as a Linux distro. They have a niche they seem satisfied with and that niche isn't really Steam games.

With that being said, Valve made a 64 bit client for Mac so whichever major distro is first will probably push Valve to finally make a 64 bit version for Linux.

That's a very different kind of thing. The apple ecosystem is tiny. They themselves make every single device supported by the OS. They make the only variant of the OS. They have the power to change whatever they want and everyone who wants any access to apps (or users) needs to follow apple's guidelines. They also have something close to a monopoly in certain professional use cases. So they can push whatever they want and everyone has to suck it up.

Compare that to Fedora. Fedora is just one distro in a sea of different Linux distros. They aren't even the biggest one, not by a longshot. So if they drop 32bit, that won't force Valve to move Steam to 64bit and it certainly won't push game developers to update old, unsupported games that were never meant to run on Linux at all to change anything.

Most likely, people would just move to a different distro.

No. Valve (the biggest offender) will have to make native 64-bit Steam before then, as will the remaining holdouts, so Linux distros will be able to remove 32-bit packages in a timely manner.

Removing then now will break too much to be worth doing.

at least for another 6 months...