Ubuntu 19.10 To Drop 32-bit x86 Packages

[chroma]

Well, supporting a 34-year-old architecture on a mainline desktop OS probably doesn't make much sense. And people running 32-bit x86 hardware still have Linux distro options such as Debian/i386. I grew increasingly frustrated trying to keep an old Athlon XP box running in the basement (nice space heater) when "i386" binaries would nevertheless expect SSE2 support (how is that not an i686 binary?!) etc.

[Niarbeht]

Half or even more steam games need 32bit libs but steam-runtime can save it. Most on GOG need it too. Steam itself is 32bit for now. I hope they release soon 64-bit Steam.
Dont know what with some old games or wine32 games?

There's a difference between a 32-bit OS and having multilib support. They aren't going to stop shipping 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they are going to stop shipping an operating system that can boot on a Pentium 3.

[Xaero_Vincent]

There's a difference between a 32-bit OS and having multilib support. They aren't going to stop shipping 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they are going to stop shipping an operating system that can boot on a Pentium 3.

I think the news means Ubuntu is also going to stop shipping 32-bit compatibility libraries starting with 19.10.

[cl333r]

I'm all for that, otherwise Steam on Linux will stay 32bit for the next 20 years.

[Raka555]

It is actually thanks to 64bit that most apps bloated up very badly in recent times.
64 bit makes sense for a kernel if you have a lot of memory.
The perfect world would have been a 64bit kernel with 32bit user space (Still waiting for x32 ) ( I think https://www.elivecd.org/ was the only distro doing it. Not sure if that is still the case)
User space apps seldom need a lot of memory for a single app, except recent cross platform GUI run-times (chrome/firefox/etc) need huge amounts of memory.

I really hope that 32bit arm will be with us for a long time to come as most SBC's do not have huge amounts of memory and therefore do not need the inefficiency of 64bit... (I am not holding my breath though)

IMO if an app (except database etc) use more than 2GiB RAM (think eclipse etc), they are in a serious need of a rethink ...

[shmerl]

Time for gamers to ditch Ubuntu. But the trend is worrying. What will other distros do?

[Raka555]

Seems we lost the technology to make small and efficient software (GUIs) at the same time we lost the technology to go to the moon ...

[brent]

This is a bad way of ending i386 support. As others have said, lots of games and some applications still require i386 compatibility. The proposed alternatives (LXD container) aren't really practical going forward. I can't imagine how Steam is going to support 32 bit games without 32 bit OpenGL/Vulkan driver packages either.

There is a better way: gradually phase out support. As i386 arch is only used for software compatibility nowadays, it would be completely fine to drop all i386 application packages as a first step. It would probably be fine to drop some rarely used libraries, too. However, a set of essential libraries still needs to be available for i386. This set is way smaller than the full i386 archive and thus this approach reduce the maintenance burden considerably already.

[Raka555]

This is a bad way of ending i386 support. As others have said, lots of games and some applications still require i386 compatibility. The proposed alternatives (LXD container) aren't really practical going forward. I can't imagine how Steam is going to support 32 bit games without 32 bit OpenGL/Vulkan driver packages either.

There is a better way: gradually phase out support. As i386 arch is only used for software compatibility nowadays, it would be completely fine to drop all i386 application packages as a first step. It would probably be fine to drop some rarely used libraries, too. However, a set of essential libraries still needs to be available for i386. This set is way smaller than the full i386 archive and thus this approach reduce the maintenance burden considerably already.

/
What is going to happen is these 32bit apps will be bundling their own "mini distro" with all required 32bit libraries as snap/flatpak/etc with EVERY app ...

[brent]

What is going to happen is these 32bit apps will be bundling their own "mini distro" with all required 32bit libraries as snap/flatpak/etc with EVERY app ...

This simply will not work at all with GPU drivers though. Any alternative to this is going to reinvent multilib, badly.