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.
The removal doesn’t leave users entirely without options, though. The GNOME team considered switching to use the org.freedesktop.i386.Compat extension from the Freedesktop SDK instead. Since the GNOME runtime already uses that SDK, the transition was relatively straightforward. Only four applications — two in Flathub, one in Flathub Beta, and one archived — were affected.
Developers Abderrahim Kitouni and another GNOME contributor worked on porting all affected apps to the GNOME 49 runtime, with help from the Bottles team during testing. Pull requests are already open, and most changes are either merged or nearly complete.
As a result, GNOME’s Flatpak Runtime is now available only for x86_64 and AArch64. The normal armv7 and i386 builds were already dropped a couple of years ago, so this move officially ends QA testing of 32-bit targets across the GNOME stack.
While some individual projects, like GLib, still run their own CI for 32-bit architectures, it’s now a per-project choice rather than a GNOME-wide policy. Maintainers may still accept patches to fix 32-bit issues, but they’re no longer expected to support them.
For distributors still relying on 32-bit GNOME builds, the burden now shifts downstream. They’ll need to debug and maintain those builds themselves — or, as GNOME suggests, get involved upstream to help prevent further bit rot in 32-bit code paths.
For more information, see the announcement on GNOME’s blog.
