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Ubuntu Backtracks on Removing 32-Bit Compatibility

posted by chromas on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the hold-your-horses dept.

takyon writes:

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.

Also at Engadget and ZDNet.

Older: Steam is dropping support for Ubuntu, but not Linux entirely
Steam ending support for Ubuntu over 32-bit compatibility

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:49PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @10:49PM (#859898)

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @08:36AM (#860024)

    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

    by Pino P (4721) on Friday July 05 2019, @05:44AM (#863378) Journal

    so let the distro provide the ia32 libs

    Canonical was trying to deallocate resources for even providing the ia32 libs.