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GNOME Flatpak Runtime Drops 32-Bit Compatibility Extension
Quoting: GNOME Flatpak Runtime Drops 32-Bit Compatibility Extension —
The GNOME project has quietly removed the 32-bit compatibility extension from its Flatpak Runtime, marking the end of official 32-bit support within the GNOME runtime environment.
According to devs, the decision comes after years of maintaining increasingly redundant builds that few people actually used. Moreover, they say that maintaining 32-bit builds caused regular headaches, especially since many upstream projects no longer test for them.
As you know, for a long time, all modern apps have used 64-bit systems, so keeping 32-bit builds is extra work for developers with almost no real benefit. For end users who use up-to-date apps from Flathub, nothing will change — but really old programs made only for 32-bit systems may no longer run inside the GNOME Flatpak environment.
Update
From GNOME:
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Jordan Petridis: The Flatpak Runtime drops the 32-bit compatibility extension
Last month GNOME 49 was released, very smooth overall, especially given the amount of changes across the entire stack that we shipped.
One thing that is missing and that flew under the radar however, is that 32 bit Compatibility extension (org.gnome.Platform.i386.Compat) of the GNOME Flatpak Runtime is now gone. We were planning on making an announcement earlier but life got in the way.
That extension is a 32-bit version of the Runtime that applications could request to use. This is mostly helpful so Wine can use a 32 bit environment to run against. However your wine or legacy applications most likely don’t require a 32 bit build of GTK 4, libadwaita or WebkitGTK.
We rebuild all of GNOME from the latest commits in git in each module, at least twice a day.