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

Quoting: riusmaNo (or that "thousands of studies" are not peer-reviewed and published in very low quality publications that can accept studies with poor methodology). You will find a good (and recent) summary of the state of the art here with a curated bibliography on this subject. :)

The base claim, "Heat is the only influence radio can have on a body", is disputed. I could give you a Geman source if it helps you.

PS: And the following is a red flag of non-science: "Claims of harm from cell phone use — not just 5G, but all cell phones — should also be red flagged because they are tirelessly promoted by the Environmental Working Group". Truth never depends on whichever group agrees or disagrees.


Last edited by Eike on 25 June 2019 at 4:13 pm UTC

Quoting: EikeEven tinfoil hat wearers won't have everything in their lives wrong.

Of course not!
Their brains are not yet rotting away from cellphone radiation! Duh!

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: EikeEven tinfoil hat wearers won't have everything in their lives wrong.

Of course not!
Their brains are not yet rotting away from cellphone radiation! Duh!

If my words are missunderstandable:
When they use an alarm clock to wake up in the morning, this doesn't make alarm clocks wrong. (I'll remove that so people won't be distracted.)


Last edited by Eike on 25 June 2019 at 4:14 pm UTC

For some WINE games/programs you would also need the 32-bit version of Timidity and all the things it requires to listen/play MIDI music in your windows software.

Quoting: EikeThe base claim, "Heat is the only influence radio can have on a body", is disputed. I could give you a Geman source if it helps you.

I know that there is studies that investigate potential effects at cell level and have shown potential pathways... but on that subject only epidemiological studies on large population are relevant (knowing that there is a potential way for an effect means nothing if this effect do not exist in the population... we are using cellphones etc. since at least 20 years so we don't lack data in this field). Such studies (large population with statistically relevant results) simply do not exist for now...

(You know that my German is even far poorer that my English? I'm probably just able to get a bier in a pub and I just remember the first half of Die Lorelei by Heinrich Heine... which is probably not that bad when I think about it! ^_^)

Quoting: EikePS: And the following is a red flag of non-science: "Claims of harm from cell phone use — not just 5G, but all cell phones — should also be red flagged because they are tirelessly promoted by the Environmental Working Group". Truth never depends on whichever group agrees or disagrees.

No sorry. The "red flag" here is not that one should discard those claims blindly, but that one should be very careful when reading facts from a source that is known to give bad information (they may be wrong or right, but one should be more cautious with such sources). :)

Btw, I'm not sure where we are herding this discussion that is far from the original topic of the post, and it's difficult for me to have such discussion in English so I should probably stop here (sorry for any mistake in my comment, I can assure you that no baker has been harmed during the operations). :P


Last edited by riusma on 25 June 2019 at 5:02 pm UTC

IoT: More ways to be hacked, more ways to be spied on. Socio-techno dross. Also pretty unrelated to the article at hand---not as unrelated as, say EMF sickness, but pretty fuckin' unrelated all the same. :D

Quoting: Prime_EvilGiven that part of the reason for dropping support for 32-bit libraries is the effort required to perform QA, would it be worth running a fundraiser so those who care about continued multiarch support can contribute towards a solution? Would Canonical be open to such a solution - it seems a better use of the community's time and effort than the angst out there at the moment...

The angst out there at the moment got them to partially change their mind in just a couple of days, and that's just so far. Seems like a good use of time to me.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TobiSGD

Quoting: GuestI can see why they want to remove 32 bit libs because it's a ton of work.

But a ton of work for whom? They still get the majority of their packages directly from Debian, throwing a patch on one or the other package and just compile. If Debian still supports newer versions of 32 bit libraries, how much work is there really to be done for canonical?

How much work is it to deal with many many thousands of packages and actually make a new release every 6 months? If I need to explain to you why there is a lot of work to do this the conversation is kinda already over I'm sad to say. Sure they get packages from Debian. There is a lot of work maintaining and supporting them as a whole. If you don't think keeping 32 bit is a lot of work I think you're somewhat out of touch. Sure, it's easier than if they had to make every single package themselves, but that doesn't mean it's not complex to keep everything working smoothly and supporting it.

Are we talking about two different things again? Many thousands sounds rather like you're talking about releasing the whole distro on 32-bit, so as to be usable on 32-bit hardware. But after this many pages of discussion, I thought it was rather clear that's not what we're talking about and not something most people had a problem with.
Do all the 32-bit games etc. really depend on thousands of libraries? I'm prepared to be told yes, it just seems kind of odd.

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: GuestThat's fine, you can be out. Just how many 32 bit apps do you run on your machine? I run one, steam.

I guess you are not a gamer and not in this topic then. A lot of older games are 32-bit, especially Wine use case. I'd say any game older than from 2015 - is very likely 32-bit. That's a lot of games! So Steam client itself is pretty much irrelevant in comparison with sheer amount of 32-bit games.

But they are keeping the 32 bit stuff that makes everything work currently. They don't make older games anymore.

As I understand, the problem is more than just the legacy games; If it were just an issue of legacy 32bit native applications, frozen library versions might suffice – though I'm not adept enough with Linux to check that statement.

The major issue seems to be that Wine/Proton need 32bit libraries to provide compatibility with Windows software, and they need updated versions of those libraries in order to continue to improve:

QUOTE=jre-phoenix, at discourse.ubuntu.com [(link)]

[Wine heavily relies on i386. Not only for legacy 32-bit software, but also “almost all” 64-bit software uses a 32-bit installer.[1] “It’s practically impossible to implement 32-bit on top of 64-bit”, so that you wouldn’t need i386 at all.[2]. So although Wine will still be available in the Ubuntu archive on amd64, it’ll be basically useless.

To support current features in new Wine releases you need recent versions of a few libraries (e.g. faudio, vulkan-loader and vkd3d, and those require other recent stuff like sdl2, …).[3] If you use our Debian packages also current versions of unicode-data and khronos-api. 18.04 is already too old to fully support current Wine with (all) current features. [...]](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/intel-32bit-packages-on-ubuntu-from-19-10-onwards/11263/121)[/QUOTE]

Regarding communication issues: It seems from some comments like there WAS miscommunication about these plans over the last years, with important parties like Wine and Valve not commenting adequately on the ideas. But if they had realized the importance of 32bit libraries, they probably wouldn't have waited for Valve/Wine to provide feedback on mailing lists, but would likely have directly requested feedback.

To be that sounds like a case of "mutually unclear communication". Valve or Wine-devs could have commented then, but it is easy to miss semi-internal communication or its sigificance, when no official inquiries are made. If important parties don't comment, you can't just assume they have read and understood your plans, yet if you never assume implicit agreement, you'd never get anything done.