I tried to search as wall and came up empty - sorry! My best guess for this brainfart is that Valve dropped support for 32-bit on Mac relatively recently and that was after Mac client has been 64-bit for quite some time.

You need to download a bunch of i386 dependencies on Linux.

Are you worried about storage? You'd also still need most of those if the launcher was 64-bit if you install an older game.

Not worried about storage but it adds a mess of packages and if I remember right in some cases you need to add i386 repositories into the sources list. As for the game libraries, they're generally kept contained when downloading from Steam. Besides, any old Windows games will have the runtimes handled by Proton and new Linux native games are new enough to be 64 bit.

If you install the flatpak, you won't need to deal with those dependencies. Adding a repository really isn't asking for that much. It took like 30s back when I used Arch, and it works OOTB on my current distro family, openSUSE. On Windows, the installer handles it.

The flatpak version can have issues integrating with the system, while the native install generally has fewer issues. These issues can crop both in the steam client and in the games themselves (since those processes are also sandboxed). I personally can't use the flatpak version on my desktop (Fedora 42) because I can't get hardware acceleration working on the flatpak client and it's unusably slow. Other issues I've heard about with the games themselves running poorly also makes me disinclined to even try to fix it. That being said, Fedora has a nicely packaged native install for the steam client, maybe if I had to manage the dependencies more I would feel differently.

I'm not a fan of flatpaks. I try to avoid them when I can.

Ok, then go through the minor inconvenience of installing 32-bit libs.

I will, thanks. That's why I would prefer a 64 bit Steam installation.

You what ? The Pentium came out in 1994.