Ubuntu MATE / Studio / Budgie All End Their 32-bit ISOs For New Releases

[andrei_me]

Weren't the Intel Compute Stick released a couple years ago 32 bit hardware? I always think on them when someone says that 32 bit hardware were released decades ago

[ferry]

It may be true for windows that old machines seem to get slower and slower. Not necessarily for linux as shown on phoronix time and again. Applications do seem to get more hungry for memory, so running a newer version of Chromium or so might be unacceptable slow. OTOH it is true on Atom Silvermont (certain Baytrail) that certain 64b instructions run 3x slower than their 32b equivalent.

[euler271]

You're probably thinking about Intel Bay Trail based notebooks which have a 64-bit CPU with 32-bit EFI implementations. While this is an inconvenience it's still possible to run a 64-bit distribution on those provided you use a 32-bit bootloader. I'm pretty sure newer Ubuntu installers do this automatically.

He's not. He's talking about older Atom CPUs(~2011) which were used in netbooks, like the CedarView family n2800 in the HP mini 210-4000 (btw, I'm writing this on that machine and works just fine). These are in fact 64-bit processors, but as he said, the netbook manufacturers, like HP, limited its use to only 32-bit OSes in the BIOS. I've heard of some people who successfully modified it's BIOSes and removed the limitation.

[Templar82]

While there are certainly a few people still using this hardware, chances are you don't need the latest Ubuntu release on your 15+ year old hardware.

[Hasenpfote]

I installed Ubuntu 32bit on the laptop of my mother years ago (it still has Windows Vista as boot option). At that time it was said to stick with 32bit as 64bit was not fully supported.
I never needed to reinstall Ubuntu. Just the upgrade from one LTS to the next. It worked fine until recently Skype dropped support for 32bit.
Now I need to deal with switching to 64bit Ubuntu. :-( I'll use this chance to replace the harddrive with an SSD.

[starshipeleven]

You can keep it around as a toy to play around with some very, very lightweight OS's like AROS, KolibriOS, Haiku, etc.

I don't see the point in trying out OSes that are worse than the latest DOS.

Netbooks are a great way to operate the usual expensive equipment like (serious) printers or scanners or plotters or whatever that just happen to not have working drivers for latest windows but none is arsed to shell another 1-2k $ for a new one just because of driver issues.

[starshipeleven]

Retro gaming is a thing.

Someone does and many post that on the internet, but it's a very niche thing.

People are building retro pc's with dos and upgrading the hard drive with compact flash drives and using crt monitors.

For the love of Zod why using CRT monitors? There are bazillions of LCD screens with VGA ports.

If you have old hardware don't throw it out sell it.

Not for profit though, all times I need something I can get it for peanuts off ebay. Also netbooks are shit hardware to begin with.

[starshipeleven]

Weren't the Intel Compute Stick released a couple years ago 32 bit hardware? I always think on them when someone says that 32 bit hardware were released decades ago

They were all 64-bit in hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Compute_Stick

Look them up on the Intel Ark site, all 64bit.

They have 32bit UEFI though, so they can only boot 32bit Windows and also could only boot 32bit Linux unless you did some manual shenanigans and installed 32bit grub (or other bootloader) to boot a 64bit distro (the easiest way would be just install on another PC with 64bit UEFI, then install 32bit grub through the package system, then shutdown and move the drive or clone the disk). https://liliputing.com/2015/07/simpl...ws-so-far.html

Afaik Ubuntu from 16.04 and Fedora should boot normally as they install both 32bit and 64bit bootloader, probably other distros do the same. OpenSUSE doesn't, or at least it does not on my system with 64bit UEFI.

[dungeon]

Who cares, probably there would be some "32bit Forever" linux distro, until kernel drops it. Which i expect to happen once mainstream computers got 128GB of RAM of World average, with an explination:

"As PAE could address 64GB only and as 128 GB is new norm... now we really really really can't do anything anymore... so long, dead horse".

At least that would be natural or so called organical demotion "let it die naturally, without pushovers"

[kneekoo]

The people using 15+ years old hardware surely have to understand that it's time to move on to something newer. Second-hand PCs capable of 64-bit software are quite cheap, and that's great news.

However, the software developers and distro makers seem to be completely blind to the fact that there are tons of 64-bit capable hardware having 2-4GB RAM and no way to upgrade. Some of this hardware is even brand new, off the shelf. With browsers being hogs and so little regard to RAM usage in so many software, you'd think someone would at least care about releasing 32-bit versions so people can save RAM by using the 32-bit versions of the software they like/need. So are the software people ignorant, blind, careless, and cannot be bothered about this issue?

I know maintaining two versions (32-bit + 64-bit) for each release requires resources. But I didn't even see one big distro (having dropped 32-bit) asking for money to support the 32-bit version. It's like they don't see the problem at all, hence they didn't even try to find a working solution for the many people limited to 4GB of RAM or less - which is almost 19% of people running Steam. And most people don't even use Steam, so we're obviously looking at a large number of people in the "4GB or less" category. With distros taking up between 500-1000GB of RAM only to show up a freshly installed GUI, that's a lot. And with Windows it's a lot worse, because it requires even more RAM.

As long as there's still new hardware being sold with low RAM, there's a need for 32-bit software. The software people mostly seem to ignore this, the users are obviously not technically apt enough to understand the problem, and here we are, looking at more distros taking the options away, letting a lot of people trash their storage devices with swap. Great!