It's Still Undecided Whether Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Will Support 32-bit x86 (i386)

[yokem55]

The way this probably should be explained is that they want to drop support for 32-bit only kernels. The 32-bit userland is going no where and will probably be with us for a very long time.

[ElectricPrism]

Well, the vast majority of those x86 CPUs are over 15 years old now. Have 512 MB of RAM (or less) and pre OpenGL 2.0 era fixed function pipeline GPUs. Probably fun platforms to run desktop Linux on.

Desktops sure, but what about Servers?

[andyprough]

Meh - Debian still supports it. Who cares if Ubuntu -- nothing more than Debian with a thin coat of paint -- supports it or not? You'll still be using basically the same packages. Stick a puke-ugly wallpaper and a space-stealing side dock onto a Debian Gnome install, and you'll pretty much have it covered.

[calc]

Desktops sure, but what about Servers?

A $5 arm board is more powerful than the fastest 32bit only P4, and uses way less power.

[starshipeleven]

Weak hardware still works great with FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

It still works great in Ubuntu too, the issue is that it will struggle to do more than office or play music.

Good luck running a modern web browser with less than 1GB of RAM, or see any fullHD media content without a GPU with hardware acceleration (as so old hardware isn't strong enough to software-decode)

[shmerl]

32bit only x86 hardware may indeed be a niche, but multiarch support is another story entirely. If dropping 32bit in full also implies dropping multiarch support then this is going too far.

I think the whole idea is to drop the 32-bit distro, not the multiarch. Multiarch support in such case actually can improve, once 32-bit distros will be gone. Since there will be more focus on cross compilation.

[starshipeleven]

Desktops sure, but what about Servers?

32-bit only hardware is trash also on server, if we are talking of real company servers.

For home use it can handle stuff for some basic home usage, a P4 with HT socket 775 is slightly worse performance than a Marvell Armada 388 SoC in my Helios 4 https://shop.kobol.io/
which is modern embedded NAS hardware, is orders of magnitude smaller (mobo and all), and much lower power consumption.

If I compare the Helios4 to 32-bit Atom-based boards then it's much better also in performance.

The only area where it is still decent is in network devices, like Alix boards from PC Engines (which is ancient shit from all points of view), but again outside of special-purpose devices like that it's large, more noisy and more power hungry than whatever embedded device can do the same (or better with the hardware NAT offloading engines). Of course normal VPN stuff would still have them beg for mercy.

[starshipeleven]

The way this probably should be explained is that they want to drop support for 32-bit only kernels. The 32-bit userland is going no where and will probably be with us for a very long time.

Thanks Obama, I mean Steam.

[Guest]

Is modern GNOME even viable on a i686 box? I wonder whether it's even possible to use that bloated desktop when it takes almost your entire address space.

At this point, non-amd64 boxes only make sense with lightweight setups, and will probably end up having some niche use (like how I use an old ThinkPad as a keyboard at work, the only thing it does is running a barrier server).

[starshipeleven]

Is modern GNOME even viable on a i686 box? I wonder whether it's even possible to use that bloated desktop when it takes almost your entire address space.

Ah come on. GNOME does not use more than 1GB of RAM, usually it uses less than 700MB. As long as the hardware supports 2GB or more and you don't open too much tabs in the browser you are fine with RAM.

The issue is CPU power and CPU features.