Canonical announces Ubuntu will no longer be shipping 32-bit libraries for apps or games starting on 19.10

[Chunchunmaru_]

Intro: Just when you thought Linux could become a decent alternative to Windows, even on gaming, here comes the bad news to one of the most used Linux distributions.
Canonical just announced they could drop 32bit multiarch support in the Ubuntu 19.10 release.

This will affect all ubuntu-based distros like Linux mint and PopOS unless they start shipping their own libraries, which is really a tough work and needs a creation of another repository not dependant on the Ubuntu one, so far no distribution had an huge alternative repository.

This is not about 32 bit only support, that just happened 3 years ago when they stopped releasing the 32-bit only isos. 
I am talking about Multiarch support, which is worse.
 

They will stop supporting 32bit libraries/drivers and programs.
it's like Microsoft announced they dropped support for WoW64, but still it's even worse because of Linux sotfware management, libraries are shipped from the OS most of the time.

What will happen next?:

Without any changes, programs like:
- Steam itself with Steam Proton especially.

- 32 bit linux native games

- Wine/Windows 32 bit games, and programs 

- Lutris/DXVK 32 bit games support.

- 32 bit drivers (needed for 32 bit games and programs)

Will just stop working unless they will ship their own libraries somehow.

Summary:

Quote

Last year, the Ubuntu developer community considered the question of whether to continue carrying forward the i386 architecture in the Ubuntu archive for future releases4. The discussion at the time was inconclusive, but in light of the strong possibility that we might not include i386 as a release architecture in 20.04 LTS, we took the proactive step to disable upgrades from 18.04 to 18.10 for i386 systems6, to avoid accidentally stranding users on an interim release with 9 months of support instead of letting them continue to run Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with its 5 years of standard support.

Quote

n February of this year, I also posted to communicate the timeline in which we would take a final decision about i386 support in 20.04 LTS3, namely, that we would decide in the middle of 2019.

Quote

The middle of 2019 has now arrived. The Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure.

Quote

While this means we will not provide 32-bit builds of new upstream versions of libraries, there are a number of ways that 32-bit applications can continue to be made available to users of later Ubuntu releases, as detailed here113. We will be working to polish the 32-bit support story over the course of the 19.10 development cycle.

And especially this

Quote

It’s no longer possible to maintain the i386 architecture to the same standard as other Ubuntu supported architectures. There is lack of support in the upstream Linux kernel, toolchains, and web browsers. Latest security features and mitigations are no longer developed in a timely fashion for the 32 bit architecture and only arrive for 64 bit.

Maintaining the i386 archive requires significant developer and QA focus for an increasingly small audience running on what is considered legacy hardware. We cannot confidently publish i386 images any more and so have taken the decision to stop doing it. This will free up some time to focus on amd64. i386 makes up around 1% of the Ubuntu install base.

What it's known:
They have in mind to collaborate with Valve in order to steam to continue working by shipping in their Steam Linux Runtime, even the 32 bit libraries. 
But imo this is still not acceptable, Steam is not the only thing that will cause trouble.

My opinion:
It's unacceptable. This is not what the Linux users need, not even what people who want to switch to Linux needs to hear. Where the actual **** do they see i386 as being 1% of the ubuntu install base? They probably do not even know games exist at all. Or important legacy 32 bit apps.
it will just complicate things even more when it's not necessary. The package management system on Linux distribution will just complicate this since it's the main source of the system libraries at all, unlike other operating systems.
Seem they just said "Oh you want to play games? Sorry, you can try Windows or MacOS.

Canonical once again really seem to not care about the end user at all;
Imagine if something like this would happen on operating systems like Windows or MacOS, all the legacy 32-bit applications would just stop working unless direct user intervention, it's a nightmare. I'm considering moving to Manjaro or removing my Linux install in favour of Windows (There are still programs like OOSU which let's me disable all the bloatware here and have a bit of control like I have on Linux) 

And i have not even talked about Wine, this will break Wine completely since the majority of Wine programs who run just fine are 32-bit only, this will break legacy applications that are still needed to be used and especially 32 bit games, even if they manage to ship the 32 bit libraries in their steam runtime, that means any driver/library update will rely exclusively on the steam runtime.

That means for 64bit you will be using the 64bit vulkan ubuntu driver for example, and for 32 bit a presumably older vulkan driver shipped by Valve.

Wine/Codeweavers worked hard in order to get legacy 32bit support for some important legacy applications in systems like MacOS and Linux, this will just make this harder for the end user.
Funny enough they say Wine64 will just work fine as the Wine32 version.

What will really happen?:
The community is really on fire right now, I don't know if this is going to be true at all, but it looks like it.

It's really an insane choice, for the ones who know the gravity of the situation 


Sources: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/i386-architecture-will-be-dropped-starting-with-eoan-ubuntu-19-10/11263

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/c24gpk/i386_architecture_will_be_dropped_starting_with/

 

 

EDIT: Looks like Valve is going to end official support for Ubuntu starting from the 19.10 version. Maybe Manjaro?

SteamOS reborn?

 

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Valve-Dropping-Official-Ubuntu

[Guest]

No surprises. MacOS will not run any 32-bit applications either now. The transition period has been long enough anyway - you could probably just emulate your 32-bit program with the same efficiency.

[FezBoy]

This is...  not good.

[Chunchunmaru_]

6 minutes ago, floofer said:

No surprises. MacOS will not run any 32-bit applications either now. The transition period has been long enough anyway - you could probably just emulate your 32-bit program with the same efficiency.

Apple probably thought that, they will be dropping 32 bit application in another way by still giving partial support to it via the OS.

Canonical just decided to not provide support at all, it's all in the hand of program developers to ship 32 bit libraries, it's definitely worse
And if I have to say, they decided that so suddenly without even asking the community

[LAwLz]

OP I think you misunderstand what is going on. 32 bit software will continue to work in Ubuntu as long as you also ship the program with the necessary libraries. I think this will be a much smaller issue than people expect. 

 

Proprietary software usually ship with their own bundled libraries to begin with so those shouldn't be affected, and open source programs are almost entirely 64 bit on GNU/Linux anyway. 

 

As stated in the FAQ, that's why steam will continue to work. Because Valve already bundled all the necessary 32bit libraries with the program. 

[justpoet]

Honestly, this is good news.  It means things will move forward more quickly for the likes of Steam and others.  One of the many reasons Windows has so many security and performance problems is due to trying to maintain backward compatibility at the cost of everything else.  While I do miss some old games, they're largely old enough that they don't run on current stuff anyway, so I would have to set up a much older system (running Pre-OS X on Mac or XP on Win) anyway.

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

Apple probably thought that, they will be dropping 32 bit application in another way by still giving partial support to it via the OS.

Canonical just decided to not provide support at all, it's all in the hand of program developers to ship 32 bit libraries, it's definitely worse
And if I have to say, they decided that so suddenly without even asking the community

There’s no support for 32-bit in Catalina.

[Chunchunmaru_]

39 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

OP I think you misunderstand what is going on. 32 bit software will continue to work in Ubuntu as long as you also ship the program with the necessary libraries. I think this will be a much smaller issue than people expect. 

 

Proprietary software usually ship with their own bundled libraries to begin with so those shouldn't be affected, and open source programs are almost entirely 64 bit on GNU/Linux anyway. 

I perfectly know this, of course Linux itself will still running 32 bit binaries, but the main issue is still present.

Unlikely Windows or MacOS where most of the time the library support is guaranteed by the program developers (you often see them shipping libraries and requiring only a bunch of few libraries like the .NET framework, or other runtime libaries) 

In Linux distributions this just becomes a lot complicated to guarantee such support, it's the distribution responsibility providing at least basic 32bit support like the glibc, apt will not even let you by default installing i386 packages (which is what happens on debian by default unless you tell dpkg specifically with --add-architecture i386 but again, here at least is still present but unactivated by default) and just makes things a lot more complicated than it was before.

I mean, the fact they are not even supporting the standard C library, means every 32bit program needs to ship every time the same library again and again, or just requires someone to make a 32bit repository with all the same 64bit libraries counterpart, maintain it updated, etc.

This really puts additional strain on developers anyway, since the Linux program development is often slower than the other operating systems this will just make things worse

And worst thing of all, the fact this also affect driver libraries like vulkan userspace drivers, libgl, mesa, etc... isn't going to help

Anyway there really a few open source games too, I think most of people will just install steam or lutris to get their favorite games play nice

Oh and BTW since the yesterday, for some 32 bit libraries, steam required the distribution support for it, like it already happens on others (manjaro has a steam-native package providing this support, here are present all audio userspace alsa libs, pulseaudio, video hardware acceleration, etc) and even though, that means any update is a steam responsibility

[Chunchunmaru_]

14 minutes ago, floofer said:

There’s no support for 32-bit in Catalina.

I still have not figured it out though, is the support completely absent, not even the C library or userspace drivers? (I don't even remember if MacOS has userspace graphics libraries at all)  

[jasonvp]

Hello Mr. Mole Hole, I'd like to turn you into a Mountain?

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

jezus... what do they wanna do? leave Arch as the only option for linux gamers?

[Sauron]

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here - first of all Ubuntu is just one distro, there are hundreds to pick from if this is a big problem for you; on the other hand, Canonical is in a position where they can put pressure on developers to drop legacy nonsense that shouldn't be required. As @floofer pointed out, legacy software can be emulated quite easily - the problem only presents itself with dynamically linked libraries. By the way, snaps and flatpak completely solve this if you really want to package something that won't work without legacy libraries.

 

As for Steam - the only reason this is a problem is that Valve won't make Steam open source or update their codebase. If you want to complain, complain to Valve.

 

Also I'm sure there will be unofficial PPAs that let you circumvent this issue.

[Chunchunmaru_]

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Also I'm sure there will be unofficial PPAs that let you circumvent this issue.

Honestly I don't like relying on a third party PPA for ALL the 32 bit ubuntu programs, which should be syncronized with their 64bit counterpart, becomes especially complicated with wine which can't be compiled with WoW64 support without both of the same libraries version 32 and 64 bit being present

Also the amount of 32bit libraries is huge, and needs people to store and maintain them

I am just against this because I don't think it's worth at all for an OS like Ubuntu

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

Honestly I don't like relying on a third party PPA for ALL the 32 bit ubuntu programs, which should be syncronized with their 64bit counterpart, becomes especially complicated with wine which can't be compiled with WoW64 support without both of the same libraries version 32 and 64 bit being present

That's arguably always been a problem with Ubuntu and Debian based distros in general. Wine is the mother of all hacks, I'm sure the developers will come up with something.

[williamcll]

Wait, why can't 64 bit linux run 32 bit programs? It works on windows.

[Jito463]

5 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Wait, why can't 64 bit linux run 32 bit programs? It works on windows.

It can, but apparently they'll no longer be shipping the 32-bit libraries in the newer versions of Ubuntu.

[RejZoR]

Who even uses 32bit anyway? I've been running 64bit OS since Windows Vista. That's what, 2006. 13 years.

[LAwLz]

38 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Wait, why can't 64 bit linux run 32 bit programs? It works on windows.

It can.

Ubuntu (not Linux) has decided to no longer include the 32bit libraries by default. What this means is that if a program is programmed to look for 32bit APIs on the OS it will no longer work.

It works on Windows and other GNU/Linux distros (like Arch) because they also ship with the 32bit libraries.

 

 

17 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Who even uses 32bit anyway? I've been running 64bit OS since Windows Vista. That's what, 2006. 13 years.

This is not just the OS. It's 32bit system libraries too, which are used by some 32 bit programs.

[Drak3]

25 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Who even uses 32bit anyway? I've been running 64bit OS since Windows Vista. That's what, 2006. 13 years.

Many people. Just because the OS is 64bit, doesn't mean the software is also 64bit.

[williamcll]

Is Deepin affected?

[RejZoR]

44 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Many people. Just because the OS is 64bit, doesn't mean the software is also 64bit.

That doesn't seem to be a problem for Windows. So, why is it for Linux?

[Chunchunmaru_]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Who even uses 32bit anyway? I've been running 64bit OS since Windows Vista. That's what, 2006. 13 years.

 

5 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

That doesn't seem to be a problem for Windows. So, why is it for Linux?

It's different, ubuntu dropped support for 32 bit only installations years ago already, but this time is for multilib support 

In Windows even on 64 bit versions, there is still WoW64 (Windows 32 on Windows 64) support, a lot of modern applications currently running are using 32 bit libraries for some unknown reasons. But also legacy applications would require 32 bit support. This will likely cut support on Linux with Wine and 32 bit apps

Canonical/Ubuntu is not a big player like Microsoft, if microsoft deprecated WoW64 as well, probably this situation on Ubuntu would be a bit better to solve

I can just name a bunch by just opening the task manager like telegram desktop, discord, msi afterburner, rtss, and onedrive are currently running on 32 bit on my system

[rcmaehl]

Obligatory
 

BTW I use Arch

[Drak3]

21 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

That doesn't seem to be a problem for Windows. So, why is it for Linux?

It's not a problem for Windows because Windows hasn't dropped 32bit support (there are still 32bit versions of Windows coming out as well).

[rcmaehl]

I made this

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