Valve going to end official support for Ubuntu starting from 19.10

[SenKa]

2 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

Does Wine the Windows-Like compatibility layer system API emulation for Unix-Like systems sound that more suitable?

More simply stated:

 

"Wine, the windows compatibility layer for unix based OS's" (As it is written for every major Unix OS, including macOS)

 

But yes, much more suitable!

[DrMacintosh]

The interesting thing is that Steam for macOS has been 64bit for some time. Why do the Windows, macOS, and Linux dev teams talk to each other? 

[SenKa]

Just now, DrMacintosh said:

The interesting thing is that Steam for macOS has been 64bit for some time. Why do the Windows, macOS, and Linux dev teams talk to each other? 

Am I remembering correctly that Steam did that for macOS because they had to? I know iOS said goodbye to 32 bit apps some time ago, didn't macOS as well?

[DrMacintosh]

Just now, SenpaiKaplan said:

Am I remembering correctly that Steam did that for macOS because they had to? I know iOS said goodbye to 32 bit apps some time ago, didn't macOS as well?

Apple has threatened cutting off 32Bit since Sierra, however macOS Catalina will be the version which officially ends 32Bit support. 

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Am I remembering correctly that Steam did that for macOS because they had to? I know iOS said goodbye to 32 bit apps some time ago, didn't macOS as well?

High Sierra started warning users when they launched a 32bit program for the first time, and Mojave warns them every 30 days.

[SenKa]

1 minute ago, DrMacintosh said:

Apple has threatened cutting off 32Bit since Sierra, however macOS Catalina will be the version which officially ends 32Bit support. 

Ah, I remembered the old reports from the Sierra days. I am hoping Catalina brings further optimizations to macOS' already very well optimized OS. 

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, DrMacintosh said:

The interesting thing is that Steam for macOS has been 64bit for some time. Why do the Windows, macOS, and Linux dev teams talk to each other? 

Valve will eventually make the Steam client 64 bit on windows and Linux like they did with Mac. That is not an issue. 64 bit OS and 64 bit steam client is all good but they want 32 bit software to still work. Because the problem is that they have sold thousands of old games from 3rd party devs which will never be converted to 64 bit, they don't want to break them. Not to mention the fact that they now even have most windows 32bit games working on Linux.

 

In the case of Linux Valve has so many distro options to choose from as the 'official' distro. So rather than shipping the 32 bit libraries themselves they decided to just switch their official support and testing to a different distro which provides the functionality out of the box. This is LInux so the community will do what is needed to make sure Steam works well across all the popular distros (including Ubuntu) like it does at the moment.

 

 

[Sauron]

8 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

But if you notice it's the steam package itself that has dependencies, and a lot of them are i386, don't look at the runtime ones

 

One should try to experiment with them on an isolated environment with an amd64 chroot or Ubuntu

 

As for flatpak and snaps their dependencies are isolated from the rest of the system and cannot be used outside, they are meant to be exclusively used on their own container, so what will work here is just wine being called from other programs, which could happen on Lutris, but not on Steam Play which relies on the system ones

Regardless, Steam could easily package dependencies for both itself and wine directly into its release package.

8 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

Also, I still don't think OpenGL, Audio and Vulkan 32 bit libs are even included, you could check the snap/flatpak

Even if they aren't it would be quite easy to add them.

8 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

EDIT: I mostly forgot the most important thing like a dumb, NVIDIA has their own libGL, so the system is an important choice here.... They cannot just bundle their own Mesa library.

 

This is a pretty huge problem.

PPAs? Steam could just fetch it upon installation of a game, if you want to run a game without Steam you could install it yourself from a PPA or from nVidia's website - hardly a problem if that's the only package you can't find in a PPA or that isn't bundled with the game or store.

[jagdtigger]

18 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

LTS ship with LTS kernels

Which can be upgraded pretty easily.... (Unlike windows with its non-existent modularity....)

Edited June 23, 2019 by jagdtigger

[Technous285]

Ripping out 32-bit software support is like saying "Oh, you like playing Skyrim with mods? Whoops, looks like you're limited to Skyrim: Special Edition (2016, 64-bit DX11) now we've removed 32-bit support and thus nuked Skyrim: Legendary Edition (2011, 32-bit DX9) and all its wonderful mods that haven't yet been ported and/or CAN'T be ported to S:SE. Along with killing off Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 3, Team Fortress 2, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, StarCraft/Brood Wars.... Have fun!"

 

Ripping out 32-bit software support also murders any legacy BUSINESS applications for your OS, that haven't got any upgrade or replacement paths due to dev issues or obscurity, crippling anything from your local PC parts store to fucking BANKS.

[leadeater]

48 minutes ago, Technous285 said:

Ripping out 32-bit software support also murders any legacy BUSINESS applications for your OS, that haven't got any upgrade or replacement paths due to dev issues or obscurity, crippling anything from your local PC parts store to fucking BANKS.

32-bit support hasn't actually been removed or disabled, distribution by Canonical is ending. You can add another repo source that has them, build your own from source, or for all those business examples they'll all be LTS anyway and not rushing out to install 19.10.

 

Hell a lot of business applications use Java so are hardly going to be affected at all.

 

After this change the OS still supports 32-bit and the hardware still supports 32-bit, the only change is the distribution support.

 

Edit:

On the point about businesses we typically maintain local repos that mirror the public ones and host our in house packages because we don't want systems pulling directly from the internet and want better control over the process and available package versions.

[Sauron]

12 minutes ago, leadeater said:

32-bit support hasn't actually been removed or disabled, distribution by Canonical is ending. You can add another repo source that has them, build your own from source, or for all those business examples they'll all be LTS anyway and not rushing out to install 19.10.

 

Hell a lot of business applications use Java so are hardly going to be affected at all.

 

After this change the OS still supports 32-bit and the hardware still supports 32-bit, the only change is the distribution support.

 

Edit:

On the point about businesses we typically maintain local repos that mirror the public ones and host our in house packages because we don't want systems pulling directly from the internet and want better control over the process and available package versions.

Also I would argue banks have all the money they need to migrate to a new ERP once every 2 0  y e a r s

 

We shouldn't just freeze progress because some businesses can't be arsed to move away from windows xp or what have you.

[Doobeedoo]

10 hours ago, comander said:

This is dropping support for 32bit software on a 64 bit operating system. 

 

This affects a lot of software. The whole reason x86-64 took off was backwards support.  This isn't the Apple approach where there's lower performance and things are emulated with okish compatibility. This is breaking tons of things. 

Well, good. Maybe we'll finally move to a actual modern environment without carrying legacy support for ever. It's like devs should consider making 64bit these days or something, since long time ago really. We have 64-bit OS for 15y by now...

Same for like some software that may not support W10 blame the lazy devs. Slow low-level API adoption because everyone wants to carry the old crap still. The old 32bit software can be made used with needed libraries. 

[jagdtigger]

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

because some businesses can't be arsed to move away from windows xp or what have you

Well in most cases those PC's are needed for machinery that still works fine and does what they need it for... They are like you average joe, if it aint broken dont fix it. Or rather if it does what it needs to do there is no reason to buy a new just because its old.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

Well in most cases those PC's are needed for machinery that still works fine and does what they need it for... They are like you average joe, if it aint broken dont fix it. Or rather if it does what it needs to do there is no reason to buy a new just because its old.

Which is fine but, in this case, it would break. I'm not saying they need to upgrade every time there's some advancement they may not need but eventually things get obsolete. Since you can't prevent that you might as well be prepared.

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Which is fine but, in this case, it would break. I'm not saying they need to upgrade every time there's some advancement they may not need but eventually things get obsolete. Since you can't prevent that you might as well be prepared.

Well most of them wont prepare. They deal with it when its inevitable. Best example is the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Instead of preparing properly they applied CGN and stopped there. They wont deal with ipv6 unless it is absolutely critical. One distro abandoning it wont do any good, unless windows drops it(which aint gonna happen, devs too afraid to yenk it out from that spaghetti code) there is no chance this is going to end well.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, jagdtigger said:

Well most of them wont prepare. They deal with it when its inevitable. Best example is the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Instead of preparing properly they applied CGN and stopped there. They wont deal with ipv6 unless it is absolutely critical. One distro abandoning it wont do any good, unless windows drops it(which aint gonna happen, devs too afraid to yenk it out from that spaghetti code) there is no chance this is going to end well.

Ubuntu is the most used server operating system afaik

[jagdtigger]

3 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Ubuntu is the most used server operating system afaik

Yeah but we talk about consumer stuff here. And sadly MS has a monopoly in that segment...  (My previous posts were examples why steam would like to keep the legacy stuff. Fun fact in all of this that the webhelper process is 64 bit for example.)

[Sauron]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

Yeah but we talk about consumer stuff here. And sadly MS has a monopoly in that segment...  (My previous posts were examples why steam would like to keep the legacy stuff. Fun fact in all of this that the webhelper process is 64 bit for example.)

Well I was talking about large businesses and banks, not really about home users. For home users as I said multiple times the fix is quite easy; I'm sure there will be third party PPAs with multilib packages and Steam in particular could work around this in many ways if they had any interest in doing so (Canonical is working with them to smoothen the transition). By the next LTS release in April there will have been plenty of time for everything to adapt.

[Donut417]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

Instead of preparing properly they applied CGN and stopped there

That only applies to some ISP's. Mine Comcast offers dual stack IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. CGN is just a cheaper easier solution for most ISP's right now. As they will need to do some upgrading to make IPv6 to work. Hell from the last records I seen 70% of Comcast's traffic is IPv6. Ive heard Verizon got IPv6 on FIOS now. More and more ISP's will do this in time. 

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

And sadly MS has a monopoly in that segment..

They used to have a 94% market share now its down in the 80% range. Their monopoly on the desktop OS market is waning. 

[Nicnac]

Can someone explain why Ubuntu decided to drop 32bit support? I’m sure this causes a lot of issues for developers everywhere not just steam and valve so there must be a good reason for them to do so...

[dalekphalm]

1 hour ago, Nicnac said:

Can someone explain why Ubuntu decided to drop 32bit support? I’m sure this causes a lot of issues for developers everywhere not just steam and valve so there must be a good reason for them to do so...

The general idea is to limit unnecessary development time maintaining legacy libraries that have 64-bit alternatives. They need to put that dev time to other use. 

 

Many applications will be entirely unaffected, since they already rely on 64-bit libraries (or they already package their own libraries needed inside the application installation). 

 

Devs that are affected can update their software to either switch to the 64-bit libraries, and if they cannot (or are unwilling), they can include the libraries themselves in the installation. 

 

Abandoned Ed projects and software? Yes those may well be affected. But it’s almost all open source anyway, so people can simply

fork dead projects and update them to comply with this. 

 

Is that a lot of work? Potentially, yes. But this is exactly the kind of advantage an OSS environment is supposed to have. Use it. 

 

Otherwise, eventually the market will replace any software that no longer works with new projects as enough need for said software appears. 

[spartaman64]

what a lot of people dont seem to know is there are lots of applications you use that are 32bit even if you are running a 64bit os

here is a list of 32bit applications that my pc is running

also the problem is that a lot of device drivers etc are 32bit and many of these devices are no longer being actively supported so completely removing 32 bit support will mean a lot of people have to buy new devices and i can see that resulting in a lawsuit

[Donut417]

26 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

lawsuit

On what grounds?

 

Unlike windows 10 you are not forced to do the upgrade. Unlike Windows it’s not like the average user paid for Ubuntu. So no one has grounds for a lawsuit. 

[Chunchunmaru_]

6 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

On what grounds?

 

Unlike windows 10 you are not forced to do the upgrade. Unlike Windows it’s not like the average user paid for Ubuntu. So no one has grounds for a lawsuit. 

Yeah pretty much the point, the open source license comes with no warranty at all