UPDATE: Ubuntu NOT Dropping 32-bit App Support After All

[matrix07012]

Ubuntu NOT Dropping 32-bit App Support After All

 

Quote

That’s according to Canonical’s Steve Langasek, the author of the original “end of 32-bit support” mailing list post that, to put it mildly, sparked a colourful parade of opinions over the weekend, resulting in the dramatic news that Steam for Linux will not support Ubuntu 19.10.

But writing on Ubuntu Discourse Langasek appears to row back on the indication that 32-bit libraries will be removed wholesale in the ‘Eoan Ermine’:

“I’m sorry that we’ve given anyone the impression that we are ‘dropping support for i386 applications‘. It is simply not the case. What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions.”

Well, looks like it won't be such a problem as originally though. Most 32-bit software stopped receiving support long time ago, so libraries not being updated isn't such a problem if they stay available.

Maybe Valve might reconsider dropping support for Ubuntu 19.10 and up.

 

Sauce: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/is-ubuntu-not-dropping-32-bit-app-support-after-all

 

Related:

 

[LukeSavenije]

my head just exploded

 

again

[sazrocks]

Still not enough for wine and other applications (like steam) that will need updated versions of those libraries.

[Doobeedoo]

Hm yeah I wonder what Valve will do in future considering they want to stay away from Windows in general. 

[RejZoR]

The thing is, Microsoft can afford doing this, they own the desktop space. Ubuntu, despite being a big player in desktop Linux space, just can't.

 

Such regressions however do affect the progress of technology. We have more compatibility, but we're stagnating with old stuff. Can't have both I guess...

[S w a t s o n]

Did Valve actually make that announcement without actually confirming with Canonical themselves? What a meme

[flibberdipper]

Man, if only Valve would yeet Steam to 64-bit. Seems only logical especially considering the fact that they killed support for XP and Vista.

[Sauron]

I guess that makes sense.

1 minute ago, sazrocks said:

Still not enough for wine and other applications (like steam) that will need updated versions of those libraries.

These libraries are barely ever updated significantly, they exist solely for legacy support - if they changed the API it would defeat the purpose. At worst you'll miss out on a couple of security updates. I fully expect Steam to work perfectly.

 

Still I kind of wish they were put in a separate repository so one could add a third party one with updated versions instead.

Just now, flibberdipper said:

Man, if only Valve would yeet Steam to 64-bit. Seems only logical especially considering the fact that they killed support for XP and Vista.

True but it's not just Steam itself, it's the games too. They could just package the required libraries with the game though, just as they package visual c++ and dx on Windows.

3 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

The thing is, Microsoft can afford doing this, they own the desktop space. Ubuntu, despite being a big player in desktop Linux space, just can't.

On the contrary, Microsoft can't afford doing this because it would eliminate one of the few reasons to use Windows, backwards compatibility.

5 minutes ago, S w a t s o n said:

Did Valve actually make that announcement without actually confirming with Canonical themselves? What a meme

meh, "official" support from Valve means nothing.

[AngryBeaver]

Honestly, we are a point in time most games and applications should be moving to 64bit support. There are some speed advantages and also ram advantages.

 

We are also at a point where all current OS's support 64 bit and on top of that the same is true for the hardware. We have had a non-64 bit cpu in almost a decade.

 

Honestly, I think more OS's should be killing off 32 bit support. I doubt windows will due to wanting to maintain a little more legacy support, but at this day and age their isn't much use for it.

[Curious Pineapple]

14 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Honestly, we are a point in time most games and applications should be moving to 64bit support. There are some speed advantages and also ram advantages.

 

We are also at a point where all current OS's support 64 bit and on top of that the same is true for the hardware. We have had a non-64 bit cpu in almost a decade.

 

Honestly, I think more OS's should be killing off 32 bit support. I doubt windows will due to wanting to maintain a little more legacy support, but at this day and age their isn't much use for it.

I'm sure users of development tools for embedded systems may argue with you on that one.

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Honestly, we are a point in time most games and applications should be moving to 64bit support. There are some speed advantages and also ram advantages.

 

We are also at a point where all current OS's support 64 bit and on top of that the same is true for the hardware. We have had a non-64 bit cpu in almost a decade.

 

Honestly, I think more OS's should be killing off 32 bit support. I doubt windows will due to wanting to maintain a little more legacy support, but at this day and age their isn't much use for it.

While I can agree with moving programmers into the 64-bit era, I don't think we should remove support for 32-bit apps. Some mission-critical apps, like POS, accounting software, or MRS, are staying on 32-bit for stability. It's the whole "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality, which I can understand. 

[Curufinwe_wins]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

While I can agree with moving programmers into the 64-bit era, I don't think we should remove support for 32-bit apps. Some mission-critical apps, like POS, accounting software, or MRS, are staying on 32-bit for stability. It's the whole "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality, which I can understand. 

With that said. POS, accounting software and MRS systems, particularly those running ancient variants are often justifiably reputed to be steaming piles of shits (a different POS) with awful uptime performance relative to many modern programs.

 

Not saying they should all swap, but the idea that "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" tends to cover systems that by modern standards are absolutely 100%... broken.

[TheKDub]

23 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

Honestly, we are a point in time most games and applications should be moving to 64bit support. There are some speed advantages and also ram advantages.

 

We are also at a point where all current OS's support 64 bit and on top of that the same is true for the hardware. We have had a non-64 bit cpu in almost a decade.

 

Honestly, I think more OS's should be killing off 32 bit support. I doubt windows will due to wanting to maintain a little more legacy support, but at this day and age their isn't much use for it.

While yes, software should be moving to 64-bit instead of using 32-bit, there's still the issue of legacy software.

 

I have plenty of games from the late 90's/early 2000's that are only 32-bit. I'd rather not have to run a VM to be able to continue playing them.

 

Not to mention the huge amount of ancient shitty software that businesses use that's still 32-bit would all have to be updated like @Curufinwe_wins said.

[Curious Pineapple]

3 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

While I can agree with moving programmers into the 64-bit era, I don't think we should remove support for 32-bit apps. Some mission-critical apps, like POS, accounting software, or MRS, are staying on 32-bit for stability. It's the whole "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality, which I can understand. 

We still use RS232 connected programmers at work for microcontrollers as they just work. Still had Windows XP machines until pretty much the day support was cut, same thing is happening again with the first (I think) gen i5's and Windows 7. Still using XP mode (the one inside a VM) to run some label printing software. I did recommend buying some SSD's and just activating Windows 10 with the Windows 7 OEM keys, but new machines is more likely.

[Bramimond]

Back in 2005 I wondered why 32bit support was still a thing. It's now 14 years later and I'm still wondering. Legacy support my ass.

[Bananasplit_00]

OK this is a lot better than what it seemed, phew

[DrMacintosh]

Complaining about loosing 32Bit support is like complaining about getting the Floppy Drive taken away. 

[ARikozuM]

10 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

With that said. POS, accounting software and MRS systems, particularly those running ancient variants are often justifiably reputed to be steaming piles of shits (a different POS) with awful uptime performance relative to many modern programs.

I can only speak for myself, but it took two years of searching to find a POS system that was faster and more versatile than Microsoft RMS. Most of the POS systems we looked at were iPads with online support, but they only worked over WiFi which is a no-no for us just in case the system goes down or we lose internet. Pricing was another issue since the RMS was a flat expense whereas the latest want a subscription. 

 

There's also the issue of moving every system and ensuring that all records move over seamlessly. Imagine if you're told that the files will migrate effortlessly, but it turns out that having a 2nd phone number makes the account unrecoverable. There are a lot of things that have to be thought of before moving to a new platform (which is one reason why I think that there should be a gov't database for a single format medical record, so that only the hospital and the gov't have records, but any doctor asking for records can have it always available and expediently so). 

[ARikozuM]

3 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

Complaining about loosing 32Bit support is like complaining about getting the Floppy Drive taken away. 

That's hardware, though. This is software. 

[Technous285]

24 minutes ago, Bramimond said:

Back in 2005 I wondered why 32bit support was still a thing. It's now 14 years later and I'm still wondering. Legacy support my ass.

I know back in 2005, whilst there were 64-bit CPU's on the market for consumers, Vista was still a year away and 64-bit Windows XP had basically a non-existent marketshare as it did not play nicely with 32-bit software available at the time, so 32-bit XP was *the* OS in use by the majority of PC's - both in the workplace and in the home, particularly for gaming.

 

It wasn't until 2009/2010 or so when Windows 7 started clawing into XP's marketshare that 64-bit hardware started really getting used and 64-bit software start coming into general usage outside of server space. and even then; there was a large majority of video games still being built as 32-bit software since it gave the devs the best ability to cover as much of the market as possible by having 32-bit XP as the minimum OS and 64-bit Windows 7 as the recommended, meaning their game would work on systems people already have and not force everyone to do a major overhaul at the same time for just one or two games.

[DrMacintosh]

6 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

That's hardware, though. This is software. 

So? Both are outdated. 

[ARikozuM]

Just now, DrMacintosh said:

So? Both are outdated. 

The hardware became outdated due to size and speed constraints. You can still make a 32-bit application that runs faster than its 64-bit competition. 

[Trixanity]

13 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

The hardware became outdated due to size and speed constraints. You can still make a 32-bit application that runs faster than its 64-bit competition. 

I'm pretty sure that Microsoft said that they found some performance regressions in (some) 64 bit Office applications.

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, flibberdipper said:

Man, if only Valve would yeet Steam to 64-bit. Seems only logical especially considering the fact that they killed support for XP and Vista.

Valve already has 64 bit steam client for Mac OSX. It's only a matter of time until it comes to windows and Linux. That was never the problem.

 

The problem is there are thousands of old 32 bit games on steam which nobody is going to recompile. Valve has to maintain compatibility.

[Chunchunmaru_]

I am a bit skeptical about this, that means different things

1) Unupdated 32bit libraries mean, unupdated mesa drivers, both OpenGL an Vulkan, with: new features and bugfixes, security updates, and pretty much critical bugfixes for DXVK/D9VK which requires an almost edge-updated Vulkan driverr
- DXVK always recommends you to be using the latest vulkan drivers
- NVIDIA GPU's are not affected with this, as long you use the correct repository, but in general It's unclear to me how they are going to ship 18.04 32bit libraries to the nvidia proprietary driver????
Doesn't make sense at all since they directly package from the NVIDIA website the driver for every driver update

They do not even compile it, they just extract the libraries and DKMS. And they said they will just leave 18.04 32bit libraries???

2) In general mixing different 32bit and 64bit library versions can make things working unexpectedly, and in the future could break functionality
 

3) Wine ABI could, or will surely break, mixing different 64bit and 32 bit version can cause unexpected things on Wine WoW64 installations which rely on both 32bit and 64bit, and mixing different libraries versions and updates is not going to help, even on snap and flatpaks (which anyway requires 32bit libraries from the root lib directory itself)  and honestly by myself I don't use neither snap or flatpaks due to limitations in usability

But it could probably not even compile at all on those platforms because of headers version mismatch

It's not clear if they are building Wine with multiarch support at all because of this, I think not, Wine folks already addressed they won't personally but I guess time will just tell. Probably Canonical will just build a 64bit only Wine version (pretty much useless)

4) Just hope they will at least fix critical bugs, security updates in libraries like openssl, pulse and alsa really mean something, it's really odd they are shipping those at first just for "compatibility" they open a LOT of security holes

 

5) apt will surely complain about different libraries versions in the system when trying to install some software that doesn't satisfy it's requirements
 

I also honestly think that all this fuss will just be a reason for people and primary gamers to just sticking back in Windows

The only decent solution to this is just not a PPA, but a centralized repository with auto-builds and signed packages which I hope projects like PopOS or mint will offer, in that case probably gaming wouldn't be dead at all