Valve Will Not Be Officially Supporting Ubuntu 19.10+

[bug77]

With all due respect to what Valve has done for Linux gaming, are they seriously arguing in favor of 32bit in 2019? Wth?
And about shifting focus to another distro, again, it's 2019. Shift your focus to flatpak, snap or even docker images.

[mike456]

Yes don't they even ship their own 32bit libs. What is TBD? Never heard.

[anarki2]

It is a rather obvious excuse, yet noone seems to have pointed it out. The Steam installer already throws a ton of cr@p under .steam, there's literally nothing preventing them from throwing a bunch of Linux 32-bit libs along with the bunch of Windows 32-bit libs they already throw in there.

Valve is slowly but surely realizing it's not games that prevented the Linux desktop from gaining popularity. It's because it doesn't work. I have to support this sh*t at work (preseed, Ansible, etc.), and I still face like 3 bugs a day which I have to work around somehow. Every feature or config option is a hit or miss, on some releases it works, on others, it won't.

Btw. we live in the year 2019 and there's still no sane way to have encryption on Linux. eCryptfs is deprecated by pretty much everyone, TrueCrypt is EOL, LUKS requires repartitioning (and also has 10 years old bugs), which is a good candidate for most idiotic thing ever.

The "best" (least horrible) choice is fscrypt by Google, which stands at 0.2.4, is considered unstable, doesn't have a way to backup and recover your stuff, and hasn't seen a commit in the last 6 months. This is your best bet.

On Windows you right click on your disk, enable bitlocker, and that's it. On macOS you open FileVault, enable it, that's it. Go figure. This is just a cherry-picked example, but it's pretty much how it goes with anything on Linux. Awful experience.

I'm not hating, I make a great living from Linux, trust me, but my opinion remains the same. Linux is a pretty good server OS, but an absolute mess for desktop, and as it's fundamentally hardcoded in it, it will remain so forever.

[Jumbotron]

Bloody Hell! Cray went 64 bits in the 80's. MIPS and SGI went desktop 64 bit in the 90's. MacOS went 64 bit in 2007 albeit with 33 bit compatibility and in January of 2018 went 64 bit only. Even Microshite is migrating to 64 bit only apps.

It's time to move on. Developers...even half way competent and market aware developers knew this day was coming. Like the slow death of Flash, EVERYONE knew this day was coming! Get off your ass, quit your bitching and code for 64 bit.

[M@GOid]

This is one thing that Windows does exceptionally well; backwards compatibility.

This is a joke right? Because if there is a thing old timers know about new Windows releases, is that they break things, badly. Even from Windows 7 to 10 some games where broken.

Being a "old timer", I find all this 32 bit gaming thing amusing because, as any old Windows user know and are used to, old software stops working at some point. Some stuff do work indeed, but the list of drivers and games that worked on Windows XP and stopped with Vista and 7, where long and painful.

So please, don't use Microsoft as a example for the way backward compatibility should be done.

[ms178]

What is TBD? Never heard.

TBD = short for "to be decided"

[sophisticles]

What am I missing here? Why is 32 bit still a thing? We have had 64 bit processors on the desktop since way back when the Athlon 64 was first released. If Steam libraries are still 32-bit, then that means Steam itself is a Steaming Pile.

[Guest]

Great, a blow to a distro I dislike is good by my terms. I hope this will drive people away from Ubuntu.

[microcode]

There is no particularly good reason for Ubuntu, a downstream distribution, to mess with multiarch. It continues to be well supported upstream. How does Canonical keep having these massive, extremely unpopular engineering decisions that make no sense and inevitably end up being rescinded after the damage has been done to public trust in them?

[Danny3]

I don't expect that the imbecile leaders at Canonical will change course. They never will, no matter if the whole community is screaming at them.
This happened before (Mir and others) and it always takes them alt least 5 years until they see their mistake.
And now with Microsoft supporting their suicidal idea with money, it's even more unlikely they will change course.
So, R.I.P Canonical, another company destroyed by Microsoft.

Anyway, can someone tell me which is the best non-Ubuntu based distro for KDE Plasma ?
Is there any that is Debian based? It would be a shame to throw to the trash all the apt-get update / install commands that I've learned over the years.