Canonical have released a statement on Ubuntu and 32bit support, will keep select packages

Too little, too late...

Quoting: RedfaceToo little would be too just continue to build the whole distribution in 32 bit. Now the actual needed libraries and programs will be identified so that better future proof solutions.
Or to continue with their plans as announced where there was way to many problems and to little time for the 19.10 and 20.04 release.

My trust in them increased by their new plan.

No doubt their current proposal is a lot better than before. But I don't trust Ubuntu in general. This whole debacle didn't help.

Quoting: ShmerlI'd classify it as too little, too late. Trust is pretty much gone. And I doubt anyone would recommend Ubuntu for gaming after this.

I guess we'll have to wait for Valve to land on a new "recommended" distro.

It's a personal thing.
Feel free to hate me for this, but I never liked Ubuntu being considered *THE* desktop Linux distribution - long before the Mir and Unity troubles, btw.

With the latest move(s) I had high hopes that this might finally change in favour of sth. better.

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: EikeWell, actually "immature" and "world was ending" were part of your statement, too.

I take it that you don't frequent Phoronix and Slashdot much. If so then don't let the curiosity get the better of you, it's not pretty.

I see it as a clash between two diverging factions: From a dev ops (it's larger than that) perspective, 32 bit support is useless and doesn't need to be maintained anymore... On the other side gamers are left with a crippled gaming library. For them, it's just unacceptable.

I think that we all agree that 32bit support has to go, but not yet. The "tooling" required is non existent or not performant enough, from what I understand. The call seems premature.

Am I wrong to think so?

Quoting: MohandevirI think that we all agree that 32bit support has to go, but not yet.

No. You may drop 32-bit support of you get every developer to release the source code in 64-bit compilable and working form (that includes compatible data formats – so many games and programs store data that contains pointers – so they are automatically out) for every closed source program that was ever released.

Take the VSTs mentioned before – some of them would be gone forever. The analog equivalent would be to destroy all specimen of a classic instrument e.g. all Stradivaris.

I think this is an acceptable outcome. I don't think it was entirely clear to various participants that what was being discussed in May 2018 was freezing 32-bit builds of libraries instead of merely ceasing 32-bit installation images.[1][2] Nor does the decision appear to have been well-communicated to at least some stakeholders prior to the announcement.[3][4][5][6] Now those stakeholders who will be affected have more time to plan, whether that's reaching a technical solution or pointing their users towards other distributions. As for Ubuntu users, nothing appears to have changed except the time frame. Whether Steam on Ubuntu was officially supported or not, it was still going to be usable on 19.10 and beyond by some means (such as container).

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040316.html
[2] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040331.html
[3] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2019-June/040743.html
[4] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147898.html
[5] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147905.html
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/c24gpk/i386_architecture_will_be_dropped_starting_with/eri4vy2/

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraThis is how things are done and decided in the real world all the time, the only difference now is that the immature Linux fanbase for some reason decided to run around in circles screaming that the world was ending.

You mean like Microsoft gave up 32 bit support? And enforced UWP only? Oops...

So tell me when Canonical gave up 32-bit support and enforced UWP only. Oh that it right this very thread exists only because Canonical decided to not give up 32-bit support.

What ever this now have to do with Microsoft?!

We are talking about Ubuntu reverting their decision to not properly supporting 32 bit software anymore. You've said others were doing such stuff all the time. That's where Microsoft comes to mind quite naturally. Giving up 32 bits and enforcing UWP are two examples of stuff they couldn't do due to software that must be supported.

True. The real reason why Steam Linux even come into existence is Windows8/RT - Microsoft attempt to force users to use MetroStore only. Because of it Valve decided to prepare Steam for Linux and later - SteamOS for Steam Machines (but sadly they abandoned it).

Microsoft failed extremly - because of community backlash, Microsoft abandoned WinRT plus relased Win8.1 where MetroUI was not enforced by default. Win10 - Metro still exist, but now it is not full screen and it pretend to look like win32 apps. Even that - users and devs still do not like it, so Microsoft recently annonced that they will start accepting win32 games/applications in MetroStore.

Yeah, I'm still going to go ahead and steer clear of Ubuntu. They may be backtracking now, but who knows what kind of radical change they might have in the pipeline.

I get it, certain people want to move away from 32-bit applications. I imagine a pure 64-bit OS might be a great boon for lots of user cases, such as servers, clusters, etc. Linux gaming is not one of those cases. I have a lot of 32-bit games and would like to keep playing them, thank you very much.


Last edited by ixnari on 24 June 2019 at 10:02 pm UTC

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraNo I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

When they "announced" this years ago, did they set a date? Was it fully decided and plotted out? How much did they broadcast their intentions so that people could prepare their transition?

Or was their announcement now still just a "plan" to be discussed, despite the fact the changes takes effect in a few months?

Everyone was surprised by this because information was not communicated clearly enough and in advance enough. Yeah, we are probably overstating the impact... but this a panic Canonical created.

Here is the initial announcement from last year: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040310.html so it was just one year ago and not years as I first claimed (shame on me there).

edit: further research shows that they also made an announcement back in 2016: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html

Basically, they said in 2016: "What do you think is appropriate?"
In 2018 as i understand they talk about dropping i386 images- not whole legacy 32 bit support, at least in your linked post
In 2019 we get: BANG!, you have 4 months to prepare your software/game/library for 64-bit only Ubuntu. You need 32 bit? Stay on older system until it runs out of support.
There was never a plan to migrate software. There was discussion about dropping, but until recently we had no timelines or guides how to prepare. That's not fair.