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: 2) by Magic Oddball on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:52PM (2 children)
I'm obviously missing something here, because PCLinuxOS dropped 32-bit support a year or two ago without preventing the team from providing updated Wine, Steam, etc. packages in the repository, and PCLOS users still get support if we visit those programs' help forums. The main problem that does crop up is similar to the one created by PCLOS' refusal to use systemd: the need for work-arounds slows the pace of updates to affected packages in the repo and makes compiling them manually a great big trip through dependency hell.
(Score: 4, Informative) by stretch611 on Tuesday June 25 2019, @11:57PM
Similar to the earlier comment...
PCLinuxOS dropped 32-bit iso's... this means that it only installs on a 64-bit machine. However, this does not mean that 32-bit libraries were removed. 32 bit libraries still exist and they now primarily act as a compatibility layer to allow 32-bit applications run on a 64-bit operating system.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday June 26 2019, @01:15AM
Was that support for 32bit hardware, or 32bit software? A quick google suggest hardware, which I believe Ubuntu did some time ago as well.
Dropping hardware support means that you can no longer run the OS on older hardware - generally considered a reasonable step to take at some point after the last old hardware in use is broadly considered obsolete and cheap to replace.
Dropping software support though means that you can no longer run old software on new hardware. And software, especially specialty software, has a way of staying useful for a very long time after the last version was released. Even if new versions have been released, "upgrading" may actually be a serious downgrade.
For example, imagine you have a copy of Photoshop, an extremely powerful and complicated piece of software that you learned to use really well 20 years ago, before life took you in a completely different direction, and now you only use it when making the occasional digital collage. Upgraded software might be theoretically more powerful, but it's also very different, and in the rest of your life you won't spend a tenth as much time using it as you spent mastering the old version. You may well never reach the level of comfort and performance with the new software that you already had with the old. I challenge you to tell me that's actually an upgrade in any meaningful way.