A Call For Ending 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop ISOs

[dh04000]

I'd like to see LTS's still have 32 bit support until 2020, but the intern releases could drop support as far as I care.

[boxie]

So apparently there are people with 32bit machines that love Unity (who would have thunk it).

Personally I would be running a lighter weight desktop on a netbook like Xubuntu which will still be spinning up 32bit ISOs...

[jacob]

Not only do 64 bit os take more ram, the cpu requires more effort. Also my atom is 32 bit. This netbook is from 2009 or 2010, somewhere around there.

It does indeed take more RAM, but what on Earth do you mean by "requires more effort"? A 64-bit OS and apps benefit from the amd64/x64/whatever it's called these days instruction set, which is so much better than the old 32bit x86 that it's almost worth upgrading for this reason alone. It allows 64 bit code to use twice as many registers (16 GPR and 16 SIMD) plus many other goodies (IP-relative addressing, sane memory model etc. among others) and as a result, CPU-intensive code often runs significantly faster in 64 bit mode than in 32 bit mode on the same chip.

[geearf]

- a 32bit image is limited to 4GB RAM, but many computers today still don't have more than that

With PAE you can do more than 4GB.

[jacob]

Incidentally, it makes me think about ARM - do ARMv8 (aka aarch64) cpus also have a 32-bit compatibility mode which can be switched to and from a 64 bit kernel?

[smitty3268]

It does indeed take more RAM, but what on Earth do you mean by "requires more effort"? A 64-bit OS and apps benefit from the amd64/x64/whatever it's called these days instruction set, which is so much better than the old 32bit x86 that it's almost worth upgrading for this reason alone. It allows 64 bit code to use twice as many registers (16 GPR and 16 SIMD) plus many other goodies (IP-relative addressing, sane memory model etc. among others) and as a result, CPU-intensive code often runs significantly faster in 64 bit mode than in 32 bit mode on the same chip.

I suspect the original poster was trying to discuss the fact that 64-bit pointers can sometimes have a negative performance impact by reducing cache space. However, in most cases the 64-bit version of the app is typically still faster so he was wrong about that.

[smitty3268]

With PAE you can do more than 4GB.

PAE is a giant hack that needs to die.

[DeepDayze]

PAE is a giant hack that needs to die.

But hey PAE works, as I have used it when I had a 32 bit Debian install running on my trusty old AMD64 X2 machine that had 8GB RAM installed. Had hardly any issue with PAE and all 8GB was recognized.

[roboman2444]

The idea that 32 bit computers can't handle Ubuntu Unity 7 or 8 is bullshit.

If you cant run an os + desktop environment on something less than 10 years old, then there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with your os + desktop environment.

[linuxforall]

What about my Dell Mini 10v netbook? It runs Ubuntu 14.04 just fine. Perhaps a little slow, but more than usable for sure. The idea that 32 bit computers can't handle Ubuntu Unity 7 or 8 is bullshit. Lots of 32 bit machines out there that can run modern Ubuntu with Unity 7 or 8. My netbook has an atom cpu and 1 gb ram. If my netbook can run Ubuntu then plenty of 32 bit machines with 2 or 4 GB Ram can too.

On the same note 32 bit LTS 14.04 running like champ on my old ASUS 2GB AMD netbook here.