Ubuntu Developer Talks Down Impact Of 32-Bit Changes For Ubuntu 19.10

[moilami]

I would expect all responsible mainstream distros to drop 32 bit support in the coming years. Ubuntu is on the right path here. It is simply a waste of effort to support GAMES used by a tiny portion of the Linux community. Hopefully we will not fall into the same stupidity we saw in the migration to Python3. In either case a few idiots cause a great deal of harm when the developers tried to fix real Python problems.

If you do not have many users, then you for sure want to keep everyone on boat you have.

[moilami]

nobody wants to see ubuntu fail. But we had like 10 years or more of Ubuntu dominance, don't get me wrong they done great things for the linux desktop, but maybe it's time for new blood. Technological companies usually have a lifecycle of 10-15 years then they enter in decay, some exceptions are apple and microsoft and google, but normally that's what happen to tech companies, maybe ubuntu had it's momentum and now it's slowly decaying (imho).


I think linus himself said, that valve was going to save the linux desktop, and that's exactly what they are doing.

Ubuntu has always been irrelevant for me, now more than ever.

[wyatt8740]

In all consumer use-cases duplicity is defacto. Stable Old Deps are part of Flatpak, Snap, Runtimes, etc... You don't hear the old man complaining about installing 10 versions of Microsoft Visual C++ or Direct X to be compatible with apps and games on his beloved Windows 10 machine, neih.

Well, if I may make a broad, sweeping generalization, Windows users are much more likely to be "point-n-drool" types that don't care or even know if they've got 500 megabytes of duplicate DLL's scattered across their systems (example: multiple webkit/blink DLL's for Opera, Chrom[e/ium], etc.).
Not that there aren't knowledgeable windows users who care; the kinds that do are likely the kinds who know that Windows NT + NTFS supports symbolic links, and who likely have custom %PATH% variables set up. You'll find Unix-like systems tend to attract a more knowledgeable crowd (discounting Mac OS users, since most of them never even open a terminal).

Anyway, the whole point of a package managed system is to allow for less redundancy and more space savings by providing a consistent ABI between different pieces of software in the package system.

If the grumpy old man wants to game on his Atari 2600 be my guest, but going on a mini rant about how gaming on linux sucks because it installed extra libs is the weakest argument I've ever heard

I'm 22, thanks. And yeah, I own a 2600. Not my favorite console, but I do like River Raid.
I'd not say it's a deal breaker, but it's definitely not very "unix-y" in the sense that we've come to expect from our BSD and Linux "packages" heritage. I _hate_ having to mess with LD_LIBRARY_PATH; DLL hell's one of the things I miss least about Windows.

Clearly Canonical are putting their contractual partners first (ie Microsoft) and have no problem hurt Linux by co-producing WSL/WLS2 and dropping vital 32-bit libraries which will effect 7 years of work by Valve to get 10,000+ games running on Linux.

Oh, man, I'd forgotten about that. I guess that's another reason to dislike Canonical.
Tragic, since Ubuntu 8.04 was my first (Unix-like) love. But Debian's been good to me, and even FreeBSD's been sort of fun in its own way.