A Call For Ending 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop ISOs

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Your 3 line long calculations are utter crap.

What calculations? And please, do not respond to that, it's rhetorical. As in, I literally did not write down a single calculation. As far as the true difference goes -- I have tried and I did find... an almost negligible difference between 32 and 64. Then again, the difference may very well depend heavily on the types (and number) of applications used and the actual memory and swap pressure that comes with that.

[blackout23]

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.

No it doesn't work.

https://cl4ssic4l.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/linus-torvalds-about-pae/

[Lltp]

1- This is open source: if some of you guys are not happy with what you get for free, feel as free to start and maintain an Ubuntu 32-bit community edition.

2- There is no real problem with bandwidth. However, having people to create ISOs, maintain repos and patch programs which broke only when compiled in 32-bit is a pure waste of energy.

3- There is a difference in maintaining 32-bit libs for wine and compatibility with generally closed-source programs and maintaining 32-bit version of every program of the complete repo.

[Lltp]

4- 32-bit can still have its use (crappy sub 1GB notebooks still sold *today* because of Microsoft crappy licence). However I really wonder who would be to blame: the one who sells obsolete and undersized hardware or the one who buys it... At worse, this is precisely where you can switch from Ubuntu to another distro, or, at least, to another DE to get you 30% RAM back. The RAM reduction side effect is just that: a side effect. It would seem much more reasonable to reduce the number of stuff taking up RAM instead of choosing an architecture to 'solve' that. Using less web browser tabs/apps can also be a solution.

5- Until very recently, x86 was actually i386/i486 depending on the distros. Which basically means that it was optimized for CPUs released in 1985/1989 respectively. 1995 for i686! Don't expect to have better optimisations for march=ix86 and mtune=generic are the defaults in almost all the 32bit distros.

6- The OP is right: rare exceptions appart, 32bit-only CPUs just don't have the horsepower to make a recent DE run smoothly. Your 1GB netbook is most certainly 64bit.

But again, if you don't agree, instead of relieving your frustration right here, read and reread my point #1.

You don't have time? You don't have the money? You don't have the knowledge? That should be just fine because if this plan is carried out and it really annoys people, some more active and knowledgable people will start something for you. If they don't then it means that you are in a too small niche or that it doesn't really annoys people that much in the end. In which case, just move on.

[chithanh]

I think maybe there were some Atom chips briefly that didn't support it?

The Atom N270, the chip that started the netbook revolution, was 32-bit only. This was a deliberate choice by Intel, as the desktop versions of the same chip (Atom 330 etc.) and also the successor N450 came with 64 bit instruction support.

Your 1GB netbook is most certainly 64bit.

Those netbooks came with 1 GB RAM or more.

32-bit needs to die. I'm tired of having a bunch of 32-bit crap on my system because a few people are clinging to 10+ year old CPUs. 64-bit is better and faster, 32-bit was obsolete 10 years ago.

The 32-bit crap is because software vendors don't bother to compile their software for 64 bit. Blame them.

No. What's happening here is that YOU are wasting MY RAM by keeping my computer in the dark ages with 32-bit libs on top of my 64-bit libs. Buy one extra gig of RAM.

The x32 ABI could have had its uses. Unfortunately no distro ever seemed interested in supporting it.

As was pointed out already, x32 has only a very limited set of use cases where it is actually beneficial over amd64.

One is in memory or memory bandwidth starved situations, like mobile phones.
The other is in pointer heavy code like some process virtual machines.
These two coincide on Android, which is why Intel made some push towards x32 on that platform.

On desktops it makes little sense. 4 GB address space is today barely enough for someone who has many complex websites open in his browser.

[Palu Macil]

Even as someone who isn't very 1337 in Linux skills, if I'm super concerned about RAM on a machine, I'll use a minimal Ubuntu install and then add IceWM. I happen to like Unity a lot, but I have a hard time imagining there being a ton of people hoping to run Unity on their less powerful machines. I'm guessing most of you with netbooks have a main machine with enough power that you use 64 bit Ubuntu desktop and just want a similar experience. That's understandable, but I don't think it's a large enough group for Cannonical to split effort on that.

[Kano]

Basically you still need 32 bit images for older systems, but Google Chrome will stop 32 bit builds this march for Linux (but of course can't for Windows). Therefore you won't get a newer Flash for 32 bit without pipelight. Well desktop systems with 32 bit can easyly replaced, but stupid Windows 8/10 netbooks with 2 GB ram come with a 32 bit UEFI - at least Ubuntu has to hack their iso images with 32 bit GRUB EFI for those - on the 64 bit images.

[adler187]

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.

14.04 will be supported until 2019. Do you think i386 installs needs to be continued with 16.04 (supported until 2021)?

[rob11311]

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.

For what definition of working? I found with AMD64 X2 32bit desktop it was faster to just accept the wasted RAM, 3.5GiB plus 0.5Gib graphics was plenty.
An x86_64 version of the distro ran better still and actually allowed the OS to use all the hardware effectively.

[rob11311]

As was pointed out already, x32 has only a very limited set of use cases where it is actually beneficial over amd64.

One is in memory or memory bandwidth starved situations, like mobile phones.
The other is in pointer heavy code like some process virtual machines.
These two coincide on Android, which is why Intel made some push towards x32 on that platform.

On desktops it makes little sense. 4 GB address space is today barely enough for someone who has many complex websites open in his browser.

x32 was interesting, but the benchmarks where x32 ought shine weren't showing any significant compelling efficiency improvements, in some i386 was fastest, others x86_64, some x32.
A new ABI needs more of an edge to overcome natural inertia and uncertainty and make a case for developer hours; establishing x32 might be a technical debt that would be regretted medium term.

One reason not mentioned to go 64bit virtual address space, is for features like Address Space Layout Randomisation (ASLR), with 32bit there's so few possibilities an attacker can simply try them all by brute force very swiftly.