On October 15, 2026, Valve announced that the Steam client for Linux in the Steam Client Beta was a 64-bit application running inside a Steam Runtime container. Valve said the container was intended to make the client more consistent across Linux distributions.Valve’s announcement
This was a separate change from Valve’s October 7 Steam Preview/Beta update that made Proton the default for Windows binaries registered as non-Steam games, which NeoTeo covered earlier.
Why 32-bit support still matters
The 64-bit client does not mean Linux users can remove i386 multilib. In a report published October 16, MIXED’s Chris Steven quoted Valve engineer Andres Rodriguez saying that i386 multilib remains required and that running Steam in a 64-bit-only environment is unsupported.MIXED’s report
Rodriguez’s explanation points to native Linux games built for 32-bit systems and their graphics-driver stack, which still require 32-bit host support. He also said eliminating host 32-bit libraries was not a goal of the client change, although it should reduce the set of such libraries the host needs. The client’s architecture and the libraries required for compatibility are separate parts of a Linux setup.
