Ubuntu Compromises on 32-Bit App Support
Canonical, the developer of Ubuntu, has backtracked on an earlier announcement that Ubuntu 19.10 will no longer update 32-bit packages and applications, announcing today that Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 will support select 32-bit apps.
The news follows Valve and the developers of Wine, an open source compatibility layer for running Windows apps on other operating systems, saying they would stop supporting Ubuntu completely.
[...] In response, Canonical said it will work with select developers of 32-bit apps to ensure these apps continue to work on Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04. However, these apps may only work under more stringent requirements, such as running them in Ubuntu containers, something that may not appease Steam and Wine developers.
Long-term, Canonical still thinks 32-bit apps need to go, since most are not updated and present a security risk.
Older: Steam is dropping support for Ubuntu, but not Linux entirely
Steam ending support for Ubuntu over 32-bit compatibility
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:57PM (4 children)
Running 32 bit apps on amd64 isn't hard? So if the software is open source, compile it to 64 bit, otherwise let the user run what he wants outside the control of the distro.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:19PM (3 children)
"Compile as 64 bit" isn't an option. Depending on how old the code is you'll end up having to rewrite it from scratch due to bitness-specific algorithms and hackery. Blind 64-bit recompiles are a recipe for disaster.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:49PM (2 children)
OK, so let the distro provide the ia32 libs and loader and you're set to run your special app from /usr/local/bin.
Why should a distro need to allocate resources for a platform that is going away, or on software that no one is caring to maintain? We've been through this before, with ppc, alpha etc getting dropped by distros. Although my most modern Linux install currently is a DEC Alpha installed with unofficial Debian.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @08:36AM
For as long as modern cpus are 100% 32 bit compatible the platform ain't going away. Deal with it. We're not talking about some archaic legacy stuff here. It wasn't a problem maintaining compatibility before the agile idiocracy took hold, it shouldn't be an issue now. Maybe they'd have less trouble maintaining things if they didn't try to rapid release major versions.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday July 05 2019, @05:44AM
Canonical was trying to deallocate resources for even providing the ia32 libs.