[jvert]

Hi everyone, we appreciate the feedback. And we will appreciate it even more if you move it from HN to the Steam Linux Beta forums at http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/.

First, I want to correct my typo - we are initially targeting Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (not 10.4 as I fat-fingered above) We are not looking at other distros in this limited beta release but obviously we don't want to do anything to preclude this in the future.

The dropbox and chrome examples are a little different. They ship both 32-bit and 64-bit .debs so they don't hit the multi-arch issues we did. Try to install the 32-bit dropbox .deb on x64 Ubuntu 12.04 and you will see the same problem (python-gtk2:i386 conflicts with python-gtk2)

Hopefully we can get the multiarch issues ironed out with Canonical (a lot of problems have already been fixed in updates). Believe me, I would like nothing better than to remove the gross hacks.

[ajross]

I'm still not following. There's no (sane) reason I can see you can't ship your own 64 bit binaries. Obviously some of your games aren't going to qualify, but you'll need your own library manager for that stuff anyway. Why must the client install be such a mess?

And again, I'm not part of the beta so I really can't comment on your forums. If I'm going to deliver tough love it has to be here, sorry.

[jvert]

There are no 64-bit binaries. Steam is a 32-bit program. Frankly, porting it to 64-bits is pretty low on the priority list right now.

[ajross]

If providing a 64 bit binary is a "port" for this product then I suspect you have more tough love forthcoming. Really, the rest of the universe can just "build" across architectures (and I recognize that you probably can't control your partner's code and need to do multilib for the games, but really -- you couldn't make it work on your own code?). But this thread is long enough already. Just realize that you're not inspiring confidence here... Also look at Skype on Fedora for an example of a 32-bit-only multilib aware commercial product.