[mmjaa]

When you say you told it to update everything, do you mean this:

    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

FWIW, Steam has a long and chequered history with regards to dependency hell - and there are gotcha's with using it on 32-bit systems these days, so it could be that. Your package manager was protecting you from this issue, not limiting you, and I would suggest that the problem you ran into, was more related to Steams' requirements than to your package manager being borked somehow.

The reason you're getting so much push-back on this issue, I feel, is that there are far, far more benefits to package management than disadvantages, and in your special case you managed to get into a state that led you to the wrong conclusion, alas. Your package manager was protecting your system, as it is designed to do - what you needed to do was identify which package had the foul dependencies, and either decide to override the package manager, or uninstall the original app - which I believe was Steam.

Steam on Linux does have gotcha's - one of which, the designers of Steam also don't want to have to maintain a package repo or play nice with distro's efforts to keep peoples systems clean and well-maintained (too expensive to actually play along) .. so the fact that you were being tripped up by Steam, and subsequently blamed Linux-worlds' package management, is double-frustrating for those of us who have been using package management for decades and consider it one of the principle advantages to being Linux users, over the hell of Windows installation that has cropped the industry for decades.