Wine Developers Appear Quite Apprehensive About Ubuntu's Plans To Drop 32-Bit Support

[carewolf]

This is like stupid web developers and site maintainers bitching about Flash being deprecated. You KNEW this day was coming. You sat on your ass. Deal with it.

You are complaining that the wine team didn't reprogram every 32bit Windows application from scratch??

Yeah, how lazy of them.....

[Nocifer]

Are you saying it isn't?

Kinda hard to say it isn't when Steam only measures the user base at roughly 1%. That's not exactly not s small edge case. To me it's the very definition of.

Yes, I'm saying it isn't. Calling something an edge case implies not only that it's an afterthought, but also that it should be an afterthought. Linux gaming (and thus WINE) is far from an afterthought; it's a developing market that is currently an edge case only because it hasn't managed to gain a proper foothold yet.

What's more, it's a matter of perspective. Seen from the point of view of game developers at large, yes, Linux is an edge case. And to be honest the same thing can be said about Linux in general when it comes to casual desktop usage (which includes gaming). But seeing it from the point of view of the edge case itself (that's us) then calling it an edge case is like declaring "who cares". And gaming is most certainly not a "who cares" aspect of Linux, considering it's one of the few reasons that block Linux from claiming a larger portion of the market.

Deprecating x86 libraries and dismissing WINE's need of them as an edge case is like saying that Linux-preinstalled laptops are an edge case and deprecating tools like e.g. fwupd because they're only needed by a fraction of the market, instead of pushing for more Linux-preinstalled laptops.

The problem here is that Microsoft isn't really deprecating 32-bit, so Wine can't dictate how people should develop their Windows software.

Exactly that.

There is a problem windows kernel is 64 bit. 32 bit drivers are deprecated. So when you are using a 32 bit dx or opengl application on windows you are thunking to 64 bit anyhow for all your input/output. So wine needing 32 bit host libraries is more a development short cut not that high in the required really.

Now its having the developer resources to complete out hangover. So that windows 32 bit applications thunks to wine 64 bit then wine 64 bit talks to host. This is a path forward for wine. Of course this does not help native 32 bit Linux programs.

If this is true, if WINE can make it so that every piece of Windows x86 code can be used as is with only x64 libraries, then this changes things completely. But can this really be done?

No, I'm saying that WINE uses "gaming on Linux is a small edge case" to refuse inclusion of literally any interesting addition to their software that wasn't made by them. Gallium-Nine support at the time, DXVK, etc etc.

OK, you got me there. Clearly the clueless oaf is not you, so allow me to take it back.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

wine is a mistake, it makes people rely on buggy solutions rather than unite and offer sane environment for apps/games to prosper

Wine is not only there to run recent games or programs but also to make sure we can still enjoy games who where made in the past and will never see an update again for various reasons.

I don't see any reason at all to drop 32bit support. There are probably also a lot of native games that will stop working if they go ahead with this

[mrjayviper]

Would this a problem for Ubuntu's paying customers?

[ObiWan]

If this is true, if WINE can make it so that every piece of Windows x86 code can be used as is with only x64 libraries, then this changes things completely. But can this really be done?

Don't they do something like that for old 16-bit code?

[duby229]

Oh yay! Ubuntu decided to kill itself.... Nice!

[elvis]

I don't know where you got this notion that Canonical somehow has the power to unilaterally render every x86 program inoperable

I didn't say that at all. The comment I replied directly to (and quoted) was:

wine is a mistake, it makes people rely on buggy solutions rather than unite and offer sane environment for apps/games to prosper

WINE is not a mistake. It continues to be exceptionally useful software to a huge variety of users and purposes. Preservation is just one. Likewise, it does not at all prevent forward movement of new technologies and code. The efforts of WINE developers in no way retard progress, nor is there such a vastly limited pool of development talent that WINE-dev is stealing from those resources.

The same thing happened when x64 came along and broke compatibility with 16 bit programs, yet nobody bemoans that all 16 bit programs are lost to history.

Plenty of people bemoan *any* software lost to history. Just because you're not listening, doesn't mean they don't exist. By all means, join any of the hundreds of digital preservation effort discussions going on all over the planet right now - they exist in all shapes and sizes across many nations and languages (human and machine). WINE is a very important piece of that puzzle. So are tools like FreeDOS, DOSBox, MAME, and many more. (Not just for games either - MAME can currently emulate entire pre-x86 Personal Computers UNIX servers and workstations on a huge variety of architectures and CPUs, running an equally enormous array of operating systems and application software).

Human history is documented in many forms. Software is just one of them. Analyzing, documenting and running that software are part of these preservation efforts, and how we record modern history. No different to how we keep old technology from other industries alive to study and document for similar purposes (visit any museum to see these things on display across countless passtimes, domains and industries).

It's clear that doesn't interest at least two people in this thread, and that's perfectly fine. Those that feel that way are free to continue ignoring it. But don't make the mistake of assuming it interests *no-one* because an individual personally doesn't care.

Beyond all that, one of the world's most popular desktop free software operating systems dropping support for 32bit support and thus a project like WINE (itself desktop-focused for the most part) is worthy of constructive criticism. I understand Canonical's desire to simplify their development and testing. But I also understand what WINE stand to lose (or be forced to take on with far fewer resources) due to it. And to repeat myself: it's somewhat myopic to posit the argument "I don't care about it, therefor no-one else does either".

[Chugworth]

We should forget about all movies that were not create in native 4K. Just burn them because they are not worth to exist!

In the case of old movies, we convert them to a standard that plays on modern hardware. We don't roll out some big film projector to play them.

Basically, Wine's game is changing. For a long time, Wine was a way to run Windows apps in Linux. Now it seems their program is more specifically for running OLD Windows apps in Linux. Newer .NET apps would be more likely to support 64-bit, and run through Mono.

What this means for Wine is that providing the means to run 32-bit software is now their responsibility, not the distribution's.

Apple is so good in this that gaming on Macs is an extremely rare activity. It could be different, but gamers usually want to keep their library for years, and with Apple they are constantly losing titles from theirs collections.
That's why people prefer PCs and consoles.

The gaming situation is a bit different on iOS, no? Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not an Apple fan. But one thing I appreciate about them is their history of pushing the industry away from old technology.

[skeevy420]

In the case of old movies, we convert them to a standard that plays on modern hardware. We don't roll out some big film projector to play them.

Basically, Wine's game is changing. For a long time, Wine was a way to run Windows apps in Linux. Now it seems their program is more specifically for running OLD Windows apps in Linux. Newer .NET apps would be more likely to support 64-bit, and run through Mono.

What this means for Wine is that providing the means to run 32-bit software is now their responsibility, not the distribution's.

So because Mono can run some newer .NET apps we should just drop 32bit support?



Lay off the crack pipe.

[schmidtbag]

For example, PCSX2 - a Playstation 2 emulator.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/pcsx2

Fine, fair enough - so include its dependencies. My point still stands: there's only a finite mount of 32-bit libraries necessary that need to be ported/maintained on the amd64 repo.

Steam Runtime doesn't provide all of the necessary libraries. It lacks glibc as well as userspace GPU drivers (OpenGL, Vulkan, etc.).

But it can, and because of the choice Canonical made, it might have to.

Some can and some can not. Flatpak is not suitable for all possible scenarios. The same applies to Snap.

In what scenario are you an Ubuntu user (using the latest version) and cannot use Flatpak?

For games from GOG and Humble Bundle, this situation will be a nightmare:

That I agree is a real problem. But again... they could just pre-package the necessary libraries.

Have you ever tried to built everything up from glibc? Of course you don't. Otherwise you wouldn't suggest such silly things.

Um... you do realize that Ubuntu has pretty much already done that, right? They're basically just giving up on it. So, wtf are you talking about?
All Canonical has to do is take some of their existing 32-bit libs that they've already built and are needed by a handful of other applications, re-package them into the amd64 repo (obviously distinguishing that they're 32-bit), and call it a day. It's really not hard.