How much 32bit only hardware is still out there in the wild and not still running on windows XP?

Sounds like a problem for a purpose built distro, not a mainline one.

EDIT: I stand corrected. I thought it was hardware 32bit support being discussed. It's premature to discontinue 32-bit libraries.

No, that's how you lose users. Private, nontransparent decision taking makes projects get dropped immediately.

The timing just sucked. 32 bit has to go, but it can't be this year or next year. And it can't be a blanket drop as the dev wanted. Alternatives are not ready yet to keep gaming working, and gaming was the number 1 factor holding back desktop adoption.

He is also falling for the internet fundamental attribution error: "If I hate or love something and everybody on the internet agrees with me, it's because I'm always right and we are all intelligent individuals. If I love/hate something, and everybody on the internet disagrees, they were lied to, manipulated, astroturfed, are ignorant, misinformed, etc."

It could be true. But it could also be that your proposal is very unpopular and you're wrong.

Easy thing to say when you're not the one donating your time for free.

I love what Valve is doing for Linux, but longer term, the onus is on them to solve the 32-bit compatibility layer issue (a-la Proton for win-to-linux, as well as their upcoming x86-to-ARM layer).

Expecting all distros (who again, are staffed mostly by volunteers) to do this work separately (i.e. duplicating all that work), for all time, is a big ask.

Don’t break userspace.

That's a kernel saying. A bit unfitting to repeat it for the distro that builds said userspace.

No. Valve (the biggest offender) will have to make native 64-bit Steam before then, as will the remaining holdouts, so Linux distros will be able to remove 32-bit packages in a timely manner.

Removing then now will break too much to be worth doing.

Is dropping support for 32bit hardware more important than being able to run on everything?

Yes evidently, because they dropped that hardware support in 2019. Specifically they dropped 32-bit x86 kernels in Fedora 31

In Fedora 31, 32-bit i686 is 86ed - Fedora Magazine

In the Fedora 31 release, the 32-bit i686 kernel and boot media are no more. Read more about the background on this change, and what to do about it, here.

^{Justin Forbes (Fedora Project)}

Being able to run on everything is nice, but what you're actually asking for here is for a highly skilled (and rare) distro maintainer to dedicate substantial amounts of time to maintaining and testing thousands of packages on 32 bit systems in case someone wants to use it. It's not just like users get to click a button and voila, they can run more games than before.

If you really need to use 32 bit software, eventually you'll just have to manage it yourself because no one else is able to do it for you. That
capability will almost never go away.

I don't think Apple is concerned with making every app and game work on their systems to the same degree as a Linux distro. They have a niche they seem satisfied with and that niche isn't really Steam games.

With that being said, Valve made a 64 bit client for Mac so whichever major distro is first will probably push Valve to finally make a 64 bit version for Linux.

That's a very different kind of thing. The apple ecosystem is tiny. They themselves make every single device supported by the OS. They make the only variant of the OS. They have the power to change whatever they want and everyone who wants any access to apps (or users) needs to follow apple's guidelines. They also have something close to a monopoly in certain professional use cases. So they can push whatever they want and everyone has to suck it up.

Compare that to Fedora. Fedora is just one distro in a sea of different Linux distros. They aren't even the biggest one, not by a longshot. So if they drop 32bit, that won't force Valve to move Steam to 64bit and it certainly won't push game developers to update old, unsupported games that were never meant to run on Linux at all to change anything.

Most likely, people would just move to a different distro.