Canonical Developer Tries Running GOG Games On 64-Bit-Only Ubuntu 19.10 Setup

[calc]

I can't believe Canonical is this stupid, Canonical is made of many people and I refuse to believe all of the technical staff is this retarded to make a decision like this (Dropping 32 bit app support, dropping pure 32 bit install is fine)

...

I'm still baffled that Canonical are this stupid ignorant or retarded, there's the shadow of the hand of enemy action here.

They aren't.

I suspect the decision came from Mark himself, as he's been known to make interesting decisions in the past, and that Popey somewhat passive aggressively posted the thread showing it doesn't work at all which should have been obvious to anyone thinking about it.

[Nocifer]

There's nothing wrong with 32 bit. But it's no longer mainstream. Just like 8 bit, and 16 bit before it.

That time has passed. Mainstream is 64 bit. Ubuntu is a mainstream OS.

By all means stay with 32 bit. Nothing wrong. But don't expect the mainstream to indulge your misty-eyed nostalgia. There are plenty of alternatives for you to choose if you want to live in 1987 forever. The rest of us are quite happy moving forward.

Oh because you know Ubuntu's users better than Ubuntu's developers. Please forgive me while I laugh.

32-bit games. Forgive me while I roll my eyes. That's not an argument, man. Get real. Ubuntu is for the most part a serious tool used for serious work. You might as well moan about why I can't run Visicalc or Wordstar. The world moves on.

And you can always stay with 18.04 which will be around until 2023. So stop moaning.

Ffs kid, do you even realize the magnitude of the crap you've been spewing all over this poor thread? It's pretty clear at this point that you're either yet another sociopathic troll come to haunt these forums, or a completely clueless Ubuntu fanboy who tries to show off by messing with stuff they really really shouldn't (because they make a laughingstock of themselves).

I can't believe Canonical is this stupid, Canonical is made of many people and I refuse to believe all of the technical staff is this retarded to make a decision like this (Dropping 32 bit app support, dropping pure 32 bit install is fine)

This is enemy action, someone has planted this idea on Canonical to cause intentional damage.

You can't have a desktop OS without 32 bit support and expect it to gain any traction in the Desktop market.

...

I'm still baffled that Canonical are this stupid ignorant or retarded, there's the shadow of the hand of enemy action here.

/tinfoil hat on

I firmly believe at this point that Canonical, after its officialy-never-happened bankruptcy, was saved by Microsoft and turned from an annoying but harmless (and even useful in its own way) Mac-wannabe distro to a truly dangerous Microsoft puppet distro who's only reason of existence is a) to be used as a lab rat for MS's WSL technology and b) to utilize the marketing momentum they had achieved during the period when they were still relevant in the Linux community, in order to act as a honeypot for unsuspecting Linux users and eventually serve as a gateway to move them back to a WSL-based paradigm where they will be encouraged to simply reinstall Windows and enjoy perfect compatibility with everything, from games to MS Office to Linux server tools (SSH et al). No need for any x32 Linux libraries then, no need for WINE even; why bring Windows to Linux when you can bring Linux to Windows with the help of the community's most famous distro acting as a convenient shill?

When people finally realize that MS is back to its good old EEE game, and that Nadella is NOT acting out of benevolence towards Linux, it will already be too late; they've even bought GitHub ffs and open source people are still using it like nothing happened...

/tinfoil hat off

[Guest]

Ubuntu is not much better. Fedora is a lot better if you're a Unix nut. But Fedora is a pain in the arse if you're anything BUT a Unix nut and wanna do stuff. ditto everything else. I don't wanna waste my time trying to get ROCm or CUDA working on other distros. There's 10:1 help ration on google Ubuntu:Everything_Else. F That. I just need to get from A to B dude. I'm not a greybeard. I'm not a zealot. I'm just a simple guy who loves Linux and wants to get shite done. And that spells UBUNTU.

I assume you've never even looked at the Arch wiki. There's no operating system out there that can match it when it comes to documentation.

[Guest]

That time has passed. Mainstream is 64 bit. Ubuntu is a mainstream OS.

Legacy 32-bit software is mainstream as well.

[c117152]

I guess the Ubuntu maintainers had a few clients complaining their cloud images doubled in size (and went over the pricing tier) the moment they wanted to glue in some Windows tool. NixOS had the same problem from the other side up until very recently whereby the maintainers refused to package the compiled wine64 binaries for years despite desktop users constant complaints.

I understand that Linus argument about how developers want to deploy to a system matching their own development environment as closely as possible... But I still think the relevant distributions should be honest about their priorities and advertise "We're Cloud first, Desktop second". Ubuntu especially sets itself apart from Debian on those grounds so when they go around and do the opposite of what they advertise it only serves to piss people off.

Just my 2c.

[basildazz]

As an AMD User, 14.04, 16.04 was the golden era for gaming on Linux with near all linux native and WINE games running from superfast and optionally 'cornucopic' proprietary drivers. But it seems to me if as WINE makes directx libraries available in linux, a 16.04 emulator could then pick up calls (that will no longer evolve) and present them to a modern system, surely this overhead would be minimal.

[sophisticles]

I know I'm late to the party but I have a more fundamental question than "why not switch distros. As a long time Linux user and someone that used to do a lot of gaming, why would anyone use Linux to game? I'm sorry, but easily half of all the games out there that are even remotely interesting are DX games, if not more. That means Windows, sorry WINErs.

But I will take it even further than that, why do any serious gaming on a PC? Consoles like the PS and XBOX are powerful enough to give one a very good gaming experience, at substantially lower overall cost if one takes into account the cost of a video card, ram, motherboard, etc needed to build a decent gaming PC.

Honestly, I even have a cheap, low powered tablet that I find superior to PC gaming, not from a graphics point of view obviously, but from a fun, easy way to play some games from Google Play on my Android app, and I can move around and play Mortal Kombat and some boxing games, either while I'm sitting in my reclining chair, or laying in bed or my sofa before I take a nap.

Maybe I'm just getting "older".

[jo-erlend]

As I see it, this is a very good time to do this work, though it would've been better directly after the release of 18.04LTS. It won't automatically become easier over time, so you have to start sometime, unless you're going to support the complete distro in 32bit forever, which I think is a waste of time and money.

Will people really use 32bit Blender to work on animations and movie production? Is anyone really going to use 32bit x86 for virtualization hosts? I seriously doubt it. Lots and lots of 32bit software can quite safely be removed from any mainstream distro. Figuring out what can't be removed, is probably going to require some effort and they have some time. I don't think it should require more than a cycle to figure it out. There may be some issues for gamers running 19.10, I guess, and it's never exactly fun when that happens. I had to downgrade to 14.04LTS when AMD switched driver models. Maybe some gamers will have to downgrade to 18.04LTS.

The question shouldn't be whether or not all games will be supported on 19.10 for its 9 month life cycle. The question should be whether or not they intend to support it in 20.04LTS and if so, which approach they will take. I really don't understand why your 32bit software would require constant upgrades, unless the software itself is actively developed, in which case you'd ask why it's 32bit only. If my Wine just depends on packages from 18.04, I would not anticipate any problems at all.

Remove the 32bit stuff that's not needed. Spend resources on other things. If you're going to do this, start by removing all 32bit support and then re-add support for the stuff that's needed. It is a much better approach than removing bits and pieces over time, potentially causing havoc in unknown corner cases. If you're worried, use 18.04LTS for the time being. If you insist that modern desktop Linux distributions must support professional video production on 80486, then I can't take you seriously.

[cynical]

Not a valid reason anymore. It was more hyped than actual anyway.

No it really wasn't. I regularly check other distributions to see how they have progressed, and none yet match Ubuntu's out-of-the-box experience. That's not to say that they don't have their own set of advantages, like newer package versions for example, but they are all generally painful to use in a way that Ubuntu is not.

[F.Ultra]

Did he drop 32-bit libraries and expected 32-bit software to work? I checked the link twice because I thought I hit The Onion by mistake.

This is clearly a stunt done in order to put more PR on the issue at hand.