This is quite a stupid move from Canonical; even Arch Linux, that it's notoriously a distribution with very little concern for breaking changes, still has support for multilib, despite having dropped 32 bit native support more than a year ago. Why canonical would altogether drop multilib really puzzles me.
The SteamOS distribution actually works really well, once you get the bloody terminal working. It does a brilliant job of getting the audio and (proprietary) video drivers working. Under the covers it seems like it was jut stock debian.
# localectl set-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
once you shell out as root to a prompt. After that, it is all the normal apt-get action you get on other variants.
Canonical have been pretty awful at ensuring compatibility IME, I'm not sure if they're to blame or the individual projects but they've flip flopped on enough things (like wayland) that cause incompatibilities for developers.
One game for instance, will start with the games display rectangle offset by the gnome top bar under wayland but not in xorg. Another game but the same publisher has the same issue in xorg but not wayland. Another by the same publisher again relied on a dependency that got removed from the base distro between 16.04 and 18.04.
I'm not sure if any other distros are better, but I've seen issue like this sit in the ubuntu bug tracker for years before getting closed with no resolution, switching users for instance doesn't seem to have worked for the better part of a decade.
