When should i386 support for Ubuntu end? Help Canonical decide

I can hardly remember using 32 bit on my desktop. The only thing that used that for a while was my old netbook, which hasn't seen power at least two years. There is almost no support from new games. So, considering that 16.04 LTS will be supported until 2021, dropping it is probably the right thing to do.

Drop x86 support - it is very bad decision.

In my humble opinion, Ubuntu on the server is called Debian. But then I may be a bit biased. :)

32 bit is mostly useful for reviving old hardware, but again, Ubuntu is not particularly optimized to be run on legacy hardware, so you are probably better off with a more lightweight distribution anyway.

So in the end, it is not something I am going to lose sleep over.

I think that Ubuntu 32bits has no sense. Other thing is the light flavours of Ubuntu like Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I manage a lot of old machines (Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM) that with xUbuntu 32bits can do something useful in my job.

Frankly it's hard to believe that 32bit builds have lasted so long.

Quoting: leillo1975I think that Ubuntu 32bits has no sense. Other thing is the light flavours of Ubuntu like Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I manage a lot of old machines (Pentium 4 with 1GB RAM) that with xUbuntu 32bits can do something useful in my job.

That is not how it works. All these Ubuntu flavors are not independent distributions. They are based on the Ubuntu. So if it drops 32 bit support, so do they.

not sure about ubuntu, but steam is i386-only in debian...

also, the number of installs does not seem negligible at all... with that logic, they should remove support for the rest of the archs with less number of installs... (ie. nearly all of them)

http://popcon.debian.org/

http://popcon.ubuntu.com/

PS: I thought I was out of this, but now i remember my kodi machine is i386... I moved it from ubuntu to debian long ago tho...


Last edited by aL on 29 June 2016 at 11:19 am UTC

Remind me again why we still have i386? Oh yeah, because of the original EeePC which I haven't used as an actual laptop in 6+ years.

But who knows... maybe in a few more years I'll be like "What's this old thing? Oh yeah I vaguely remember using that back in the day. Maybe it'll be fun to do a fresh Ubuntu GNU/Linux install on it just for kicks"... and then I'll be oh so sad because I'll discover Ubuntu dropped support for the i386 architecture. That would suck.

Well there's your answer Canonical; better keep it around!

Quoting: boltronicsRemind me again why we still have i386? Oh yeah, because of the original EeePC ...

... which I use about once every week ;). But I'm running Debian on it. In fact, I run Debian everywhere except on my cellphone.

Not an Ubuntu user, but if I had to make an estimate I'd say 32bit should have been dropped after the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. AFAIK every CPU manufactured from 2008 onwards has always been 64bit. Also I have no idea why some Linux games to this day still come only in 32bit.

I repair computers on a daily basis and frankly, I forgot the last the time I installed a PC with a 32bit OS be it Windows or Linux, even if it came with 2GB of ram.