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: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:40PM (32 children)
Ubuntu has sold itself to many, MANY people based on the premise that it would run on hardware that Microsoft just murders. Abandoning 32-bit machines would be like cutting off their noses, to spite their faces.
No, Ubuntu isn't the lightest weight distro out there, not by any stretch. (DSL, or Puppy, maybe?) But, they do run well on old machinery. You just don't toss a huge part of your selling strategy like that. Of course, we must recognize that Ubuntu makes little if any money on those people still running old machines. Those cheap bastids aren't overwhelming Ubuntu with donations!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday June 25 2019, @03:47PM (15 children)
The disagreement of the featured article is not about abandoning 32-bit machines. It's about abandoning 32-bit applications on 64-bit machines. Many of these applications were published by companies that are long out of business.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:00PM (4 children)
I think someone did not realize how important 32 bit executables remain, even on 64 bit hardware. Even if the OS only supports 64 bit hardware.
I wonder how long 32 bit executables will remain important.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:37PM (1 child)
For as long as desktop's use X86 compatible processors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:56PM
and vice versa
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:57PM
Just a reminder that Windows 10 32-bit still exists (and even runs DOS and Windows 3.1 binaries!), and likely users of Windows 7 32-bit (which was the most common the first couple years 7 was out) got automatically "upgraded" to this version. Also Windows 10 64-bit does a surprisingly good job of running Windows 32-bit programs that will be around until the end of time. Many new Windows programs are still 32-bit in order to ensure compatiblity across the different Windows versions.
I have not heard of support for these ending any time soon. Although I never get the memos.
In this case, this is probably where the issue lies since they are trying to run Widows binaries.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday June 25 2019, @05:09PM
"Important" begs definitions of what that means. Important to whom? Important how much? Obviously Canonical didn't think it important initially. If we didn't have Wine or Steam, would this have gone through?
This sig for rent.
(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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:26PM (1 child)
What I never understood, though the whole debate, was why someone couldn't just make a debian package with all the 32 bit libraries and install it if you want it? Like GIMP, and so many of the other "supported, but not installed by default" packages in Ubuntu?
All this rage and angst over whether or not the libraries ship in the default base configuration? How about the "minimal" desktop option - do they need to be in there too?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:30AM
Maintaining this package to keep it in sync with security updates and changes to the kernel Direct Rendering Manager costs time. Buying engineers' time to do this costs money.
More like whether Canonical makes the libraries available at all.
(Score: 3, Informative) by stretch611 on Tuesday June 25 2019, @11:52PM (2 children)
Actually, many of these applications are still actively maintained right now.
The biggest 2 applications are WINE and the Steam Client.
A large number of games also require 32-bit libraries and are unlikely to be updated.
Also, a Canonical Developer Tries Running GOG Games On 64-Bit-Only Ubuntu 19.10 Setup [phoronix.com] and failed miserably. Which also points out that nobody even attempted to see the real impact of this decision before making it.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:34AM
Wine is available in 32-bit and 64-bit editions. In theory, developers of 32-bit Windows applications that run in 32-bit Wine could recompile them as 64-bit Windows applications that run in 64-bit Wine. Valve could recompile the Steam client as a 64-bit application, and developers of games available through Steam could recompile them as well. However, many Windows applications run through Wine and games available through Steam are unmaintained.
In theory, a game's developer could commission a 64-bit version of each library used by the game from the developer of said library. In practice, many of these libraries are unmaintained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2019, @08:59AM
Newer games have 64-bit versions, or sometimes only 64-bit versions, on GOG too.
Not that it'll help old ones.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:29PM
I would say Tiny Core Linux is as small as you could feasibly get and still have a real OS. It's by no means user-friendly in my opinion, though. Whereas, Puppy Linux is generally designed to "Just Work" and is much easier for a newb / Windows or Apple Refugee to get into.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by epitaxial on Tuesday June 25 2019, @04:45PM (14 children)
How many people are running from 32 bit machines now? Your hardware is over a decade old at this point. Drive around on trash night and find something better already. The last 32 bit machine I recall using was a P4 HT and it was slow as hell with Windows 7.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @05:00PM (3 children)
I have embedded platforms inside buildings that are 32 bit only.
They could be replaced with raspberry pis, and it would be a win for power consumption, but that would take much installation work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:41PM (2 children)
If these systems are embedded then you shouldn't be upgrading the OS anyhow.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:54PM (1 child)
You don't tell me what to do with my systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:01PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8y8Ziwswe0 [youtube.com]
[SFW]
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 25 2019, @05:29PM (7 children)
I have a lovely 32-bit netbook. It's smaller and lighter than my high-end 64-bit laptop. It's my preferred machine to carry around for writing in cafes and such. Of course, I use a Linux distro (Devuan) on it. It's reliable. I see no reason to toss it out.
(Score: 3, Funny) by epitaxial on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:25PM (4 children)
An Atom processor netbook? You must be a glutton for punishment. Those were terrible when they were new. You still using tallow candles and doing laundry down by the creek?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:40PM (2 children)
Who said it was Atom? Arm 64 wasn't a thing when ARM based netbooks were (briefly) popular.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)
Nice try but Devuan doesn't have an ARM port.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2019, @09:05PM
I don't know what other processors they run on, but they definitely have an armhf port, and I am pretty sure an arm soft float port, plus aarch64, the majority of the packages mirrored or built from Debian's repositories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:00PM
They were cheap and ran Linux. Probably still have better performance than an Raspberry Pi. Know of anything better in that class that Google doesn't own?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 25 2019, @09:28PM (1 child)
You've got a rare gem, then, and they do exist. For the most part, the 32 bit era notebooks were bigger and heavier than their modern (and 64 bit) counterparts. Keep it until it won't run anymore. I usually get frustrated with the old notebooks when the batteries die and the cost of replacing them is >40% of the cost of a new and much more attractive notebook.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:45AM
Which modern x86-64 laptop has a 9 to 10 inch screen and doesn't have glaring flaws in its X11/Linux compatibility comparable to those of an ASUS T100TA [debian.org]? The smallest ones I could find in stores over the past few years were 11.6", like the Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series that I ended up settling for. It has a quad-core Pentium N3710 CPU, where Pentium N (now called Pentium Silver) is an improved version of Atom. You could probably find some used 10.1" Atom netbook made in 2010 or thereabouts, such as a Dell Inspiron mini 1012, but those have two drawbacks. First, they're so old that their lithium ion batteries no longer hold a charge, and fresh replacement rechargeable battery packs for them are hard to find. Second, a lot of them have 1 DIMM slot that won't take modules larger than 2 GB, making use of 64-bit applications alongside 32-bit applications a swapfest.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KilroySmith on Tuesday June 25 2019, @08:57PM (1 child)
Speaking of looking dumb, my home machine is an AMD Phenom II x4 with 8 GB of RAM (amazing how little that spec has changed in the decade) which happens to be 10 years old, running Windows 7 64-bit. And it runs just fine, except for the odd slowdown on Firefox on occasion and the length of time it takes to encode an MP3/Movie. So get offa my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 27 2019, @08:12PM
"running Windows 7 64-bit"
OMG, WTF, LOL
(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.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by boltronics on Wednesday June 26 2019, @02:55AM
Steam should switch to officially recommending Debian. At least there, as long as the community wants 32-bit support and maintains it, the community will get 32-bit support.
Backing Ubuntu means you're always at the mercy of whatever works best for their corporate interests, as opposed to the interests of the end user. We've seen this a number of times with Canonical, such as when they added the Amazon shopping lens.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!