Ubuntu 16.04 Might Be The Distribution's Last 32-Bit Release

[Namenlos]

So the LTS release of a distro that will be released in 3.5 years might not have 32 bit support. Nothing more.

If there are really x86 cpus out there, that are used more than an hour a day, I think they can't get thrown away soon enough. Just from an environmental standpoint standpoint alone.

[kringel]

The proposal is about the installer ISO. Desktop-CD, Alternate Install etc. (and *not* for ARM)

Packages will still be available in 32bit. As many programs needs 32bit libraries (Steam, Skype, and so on).

The big question for me is: Will there be a 32bit kernel in the repositories or not? If so, people could still boot up the mini.iso (ok, if there will be a mini.iso for 32bit left, but it is just the mini.iso not a huge release ISO). Because from the mini.iso "expert" install you can choose what kernel to use from the repositories. So I guess this workaround will still be left for people on very old hardware.

I'm in favor of the decision of dropping 32bit installer and 32bit ISOs. Both my oldest machines support 64bit. A laptop from 2006/2007 with AMD64 and a single core AMD from 2004. Both with 64bit support. I have an 1.4GHz Athlon from 2001 around though. It's only 32bit. But already ubuntu 8.10 wasn't that fluent on this machine anymore. 512MB RAM, AGP 4x Radeon, with OpenGL 1.3 (not 1.4). It's very slow. No need to have ubuntu to offer Installer images for such old hardware.

People who want to use such old hardware for a router or anything home server orientated, they would have no problems with Debian or CentOS or other distros.

[stevenc]

I guess we can depend on Debain to support 32 bit until 2030 at which point the hardware I mentioned will be useless.

Pentium III was indestructible! I must have a dozen such machines still usable after 15 years, quite able to run core network services reliably, such as router / firewall / mailserver / DNS cache / web cache / simple webserver / small file server.

Since then, hardware manufacturers must have reailsed it's more profitable to sell SoCs with no serviceable parts, improper cooling, and working life of only 1-2 years.

Debian support however may not last much longer; most 32-bit architectures are at risk of being dropped already, and soon it may be linux-i386's turn.

[TiberiusDuval]

Try runnning modern GUI which is not especially made to be lightweight with 32-bit only hardware, like single core Athlon or something like that. It is not pleasant experience. And even if you get OS running applications will be real problem. With typical memory of that era hardware you'll quickly exhaust available resources, unless you use something designed to be lightweight. And when you can get second hand Core2 era hardware with 100 Euro/dollar investment, financing transition should not be problem, at least not big problem in first world countries.

[Mat2]

Try runnning modern GUI which is not especially made to be lightweight with 32-bit only hardware, like single core Athlon or something like that. It is not pleasant experience. And even if you get OS running applications will be real problem. With typical memory of that era hardware you'll quickly exhaust available resources, unless you use something designed to be lightweight. And when you can get second hand Core2 era hardware with 100 Euro/dollar investment, financing transition should not be problem, at least not big problem in first world countries.

Gnome 2 (from Ubuntu 10.04) and current Firefox run very fine on my Athlon 1800+ (with 1GB RAM, Geforce 4 MX 420). Everything except for flash and high-res video is usable.
LXDE and XFCE would work on this box flawlessly as well.

"financing transition should not be problem, at least not big problem in first world countries."
This is worth emphasizing.

[TiberiusDuval]

Gnome 2 is quite old nowadays, and LXDE/XFCE are designed to be light weight. What about Gnome 3, Unity, or KDE? Firefox seems to be able to scale its memory consumption, mine uses now with three tabs open about 595 MB, I presume it uses less if there aren't much memory available.

[drSeehas]

... People who want to use such old hardware ... would have no problems with ... CentOS ...

CentOS is 64 bit only atm.

http://wiki.centos.org/FAQ/CentOS7#head-d03af641497cac21049dffa440b055c472c2da53

[dungeon]

Ummm.. Why are you running 32-bit debian on kabini?? I am writing this on kabini laptop right now, and it is running 64-bit debian..ｏ＿Ｏ
AMD has had 64-bit support even before your grandpa was born, so why would you think you need to install 32-bit OS on it??..

It is separate partition just for testing, main is of course 64bit Debian Sid .

BTW, i run openbox wm on both... does not matter to me how fast machine is i always install that, i like simple non bloated setups

[dungeon]

He, he, is that news for anyone

tasksel (3.29) unstable; urgency=high

* Gnome only works on i386 and amd64, so default to xfce on other arches.
Closes: #765839 Thanks, Adam Borowski for testing.

-- Joey Hess <[email protected]> Tue, 21 Oct 2014 11:21:06 -0400

[dungeon]

Numbers are numbers results from 2 years ago:

Today, amd64 is the architecture with the greatest number of popcon submissions by a narrow margin

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/09/msg00066.html

http://popcon.debian.org/

As we see right now amd64 architecture is at 65% and i386 declinig in 2 years by -13% now it is at 34%... so projected after two releases it will be around 5%, right time to go to ports somewhere in 2020