Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO

[bastiaaw]

Hmmmm... this would be for me a reason to abandon Ubuntu for the *second time*. First time was with the mir enforcement.. so I went back to gentoo on my personal machine as compiling doesn't take too long the last couple of years.

I use my old computers though for my kids to play with; games, internet, homework etc... I see no reason why I should stop using them as they still work. Gnome-ubuntu is what I use on them. Yes bloated games do not work perfectly, but thats the whole point. I do not want my kids using them.

Something else: How about 3rd world countries... you think they all have 64 bit computers?

[monnier]

Oh God, no. Let's just make a move to 64-bit entirely, and just drop the 32-bit stuff. What you're suggesting is a sideways move at best, not an upgrade

For many/most users, there is no visible difference to whether they're using a 64bit or a 32bit system. The kernel benefits from being 64bit because it needs to manage more than 2GB of RAM, but most applications don't use more than 2GB of RAM, in which case the user will most likely be unaffected by this difference. Admittedly, for some applications, the amd64 instruction set can be slightly more efficient (mostly thanks to its 16 registers), but for other applications the i386 instruction set is slightly more efficient (because pointers use up half the space, which means you can keep many more of them in the cache).

Most of my machines have been following Debian testing for the last 14 years and are hence still using i386 (tho with an amd64 kernel) because that was my only option back then. I do have a machine running amd64's version of Debian testing, but it's not like I could tell the difference.

The only application I use which ever gets anywhere near the 2GB limit is Firefox, and when it does get that big it becomes dog slow anyway.

Sort of like upgrading from IPv4 to v6, and people keep tacking stuff onto v4, or watering down v6. Can we just make a move already? This extreme backwards compatibility is making software development much more complicated than it has to be.

Most code written nowadays couldn't care less if you're running on an amd64, i386, armhf, aarch64, mipsel, or any other architecture for that matter. Dropping i386 won't make much difference, if any. So it's a very different situation from the IPv4/IPv6 transition. Do you have concrete data to justify your claim of "making software development much more complicated"? AFAIK The only real cost for Ubuntu is in terms of the size of repositories, the extra build infrastructure, the added testing, etc...

Don't get me wrong: I think Ubuntu's decision makes a lot of sense (e.g. it makes it easier for their users by getting rid of a choice which is not needed nowadays: unless a user really knows she needs i386, she won't suffer from choosing amd64).