Fedora 43 won't drop 32-bit app support – or adopt Xlibre

Community vetoes plans to axe i686 compatibility and switch X11 forks

The Fedora community has quickly dropped a couple of recent proposed changes – one highly controversial, the other rather less so.

Fedora 42 is here, and so Fedora 43 is taking shape. That means members of the Fedora community can submit proposals for changes to the distro's future direction. Many of these consist of internal stuff that isn't very visible to the wider world, but sometimes major changes are submitted for debate. In the last couple of weeks, two major changes have been made, discussed, and pretty firmly vetoed.

A week ago, three developers suggested that it was time to drop i686 support system-wide. In other words, remove the ability to install and run 32-bit programs on x86. This doesn't mean running Fedora on 32-bit machines. On x86, it has only run on 64-bit machines for nearly six years. The last version that could run on x86-32 was Fedora 30 from April 2019.

However, although it only runs on 64-bit Intel and AMD kit, users can still install and run 32-bit apps. At present, Fedora offers "multilib," meaning the project builds and supplies the necessary libraries and tooling so that x86-32 binaries can install and work fine. The proposal suggested dropping this. It was submitted by Fabio Valentini, who back in 2022 proposed dropping x86-32 "leaf packages," as we covered at the time.

Back then, we pointed out that Canonical had also proposed dropping x86-32 app support from Ubuntu, but due to considerable opposition from users, it backtracked and retained the functionality.

Six years on, similar pushback happened again. For instance, the founder of gaming distro Bazzite, Kyle Gospodnetich, posted a comment saying:

I'm speaking as its founder: if this change is actually made as it is written, the best option for us is to just go ahead and disband the project.

Bazzite, focused on video gaming, is based on Fedora via Universal Blue, an immutable base distro with transactional update support. It's akin to a Fedora-family alternative to Valve's Arch-based SteamOS.

And that is the key thing. Most big-name games are closed-source proprietary code, and a lot of that code is compiled for 32-bit. With no source code, it can't be recompiled for newer CPUs. The Reg FOSS desk is not a gamer – which is one reason we've not looked at Bazzite, combined with a lack of suitable hardware – but there are 32-bit Linux apps we're quite fond of and still occasionally use, such as the GUI version of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and even the ancient Acrobat Reader for Linux.

The change was rejected, and for now this won't happen. The margin wasn't huge, though. At the time of writing, it was showing 51 percent "Strongly opposed," plus another 15 percent "Opposed, but could be convinced."

The other change that we've noticed was firmly rejected in the same late-June time frame was the idea of including the Xlibre X11 server.

Halfway through 2025, the Xlibre fork of the X.org X11 server is one of the most discussed subjects in Linux. We covered the announcement and the first release last month.

Among many other controversial positions, as well as being an anti-vaxxer, Xlibre project lead Enrico Weigelt has alleged that Red Hat is refusing patches to X.org in an attempt to favor Wayland. It was therefore a surprising move, to say the least, to suggest that a Red Hat-sponsored distro adopt Xlibre, and we're not at all surprised that this was rejected. ®