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

[suicidalfranco]

20 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

That would a clever thing to do, provide base functionality as an optional... At least for drivers and basic utilities like Alaa, pulse, etc

 

They ditched it completely, and expect people to compile by their selves, so much for the user friendly distro 

 

As an owner of a PPA, there is a data limit of 2gb so my guess is eventual support should be provided by a third party

No need to compile things yourself when there's Snap and Flatpak

[Chunchunmaru_]

17 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

No need to compile things yourself when there's Snap and Flatpak

I don't think people are going to bundle games (wine games) on those though, also I remember those to be under some sort of cointainers so they may rely on the system libraries and cannot provide their own for things like video drivers but I may be wrong 

[jagdtigger]

Ubuntu 18.04 is good until 2023, what is the uproar about?

[dalekphalm]

12 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Ubuntu 18.04 is good until 2023, what is the uproar about?

Manufactured outrage, or misunderstanding the problem, would be my guess?

[Donut417]

Interesting. This brings me back to when we lost 16 bit support. 

[LAwLz]

43 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Interesting. This brings me back to when we lost 16 bit support. 

Fun fact: Windows 10 32bit still includes support for 16bit programs if you enable NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine).

[HarryNyquist]

ITT: "WTF I hate Linux now"

 

If your programs are still on 32-bit and you're running Linux then the developers should be slapped. 64-bit is better. Just because Windows continues to support 32-bit to hell and back doesn't mean everything else has to as well.

[Drak3]

3 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

If your programs are still on 32-bit and you're running Linux then the developers should be slapped. 64-bit is better.

Why should developers waste time moving to 64bit if they don't benefit from it?

[The King of the Undead]

13 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

ITT: "WTF I hate Linux now"

 

If your programs are still on 32-bit and you're running Linux then the developers should be slapped. 64-bit is better. Just because Windows continues to support 32-bit to hell and back doesn't mean everything else has to as well.

what if I play games who aren't in development? what if a video card neads a 32bit driver who uses those libraries? I can see lots of people who would want this to at least be a download somewhere.

[Trixanity]

Is there anything preventing Canonical (or anyone else) from making some optional package available that would contain the necessary common shared libraries so that software still works? Given the nature of Linux I was under the impression that it would be trivial to make and trivial to use?

[Drak3]

3 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

Given the nature of Linux I was under the impression that it would be trivial to make and trivial to use?

Most of these things made to sound trivial are far from trivial.

[Epic Wink]

I am fairly confident OP doesn't know what they're talking about and is inciting anger via misleading

[Chunchunmaru_]

Just now, Epic Wink said:

I am fairly confident OP doesn't know what they're talking about and is inciting anger via misleading

I bet you have not even read the other posts in this thread

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Drak3 said:

Why should developers waste time moving to 64bit if they don't benefit from it? 

Because the 32bit libraries are becoming obsolete. They don't get updates as quickly and support in the toolchains have gotten more and more rare.

You basically have to go out of your way to make it 32bit using standard GNU/Linux tools these days.

 

The reason why developers should "waste their time" is because it keeps their users safe by not relying on libraries which doesn't get as much attention as the 64bit counterparts, and because we have slowly been moving towards 64bit-only ecosystems for quite a while now. It's something that will happen sooner or later.

 

 

1 hour ago, will1432 said:

what if I play games who aren't in development? what if a video card neads a 32bit driver who uses those libraries? I can see lots of people who would want this to at least be a download somewhere.

That's the one thing that might be affected by this change.

Outdated programs which are no longer in development, and that doesn't bundle the necessary libraries themselves. But like Canonical said, Valve might include a container with 32bit support. Games is probably the biggest group of applications that might be affected by this since they re usually closed source, not developed with GNU/Linux in mind, and a lot of them are no longer in development.

 

 

1 hour ago, Trixanity said:

Is there anything preventing Canonical (or anyone else) from making some optional package available that would contain the necessary common shared libraries so that software still works?

Nope, not really. Seems to me like it's mostly a move to get people to focus on 64bit applications and get rid of a lot of work maintaining 32bit support. Making an optional package to download would defeat that purpose.

[Trixanity]

7 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Nope, not really. Seems to me like it's mostly a move to get people to focus on 64bit applications and get rid of a lot of work maintaining 32bit support. Making an optional package to download would defeat that purpose.

I mean any whining developers could make a package if they refuse to go 64 bit. Could even be helpful to other whining developers.

[Chunchunmaru_]

6 minutes ago, Trixanity said:

I mean any whining developers could make a package if they refuse to go 64 bit. Could even be helpful to other whining developers.

It is definitely an option, even if eventually you need to enable i386 architecture manually(it's a command) in dpkg before installing any i386 libs, like by default Debian does.

 

Debian let's you install i386 as an option but provide regular support and update for a big variety of architectures(some of those old), that are not even x86

 

Funny they are not complaining in maintaing all of those unlike a company like canonical who also has a community for development

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, will1432 said:

what if I play games who aren't in development? what if a video card neads a 32bit driver who uses those libraries? I can see lots of people who would want this to at least be a download somewhere.

For option #1, playing old legacy games: You do what people who run old games that don't work on Windows 10 anymore - you either just run a legacy version of the OS, or you virtualize/emulate the OS.

 

In this case, all you need to do is stay on 18.04 and everything will still work.

 

For option #2? A 32-bit only GPU? We're talking ancient hardware then. Again, you're running an older OS then, or you're spending the $10-$20 to pick up a dirt cheap 64-bit driver compatible entry level GPU used, or say $35-$40 for a brand new one.

[Chunchunmaru_]

18 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

For option #2? A 32-bit only GPU? We're talking ancient hardware then. Again, you're running an older OS then, or you're spending the $10-$20 to pick up a dirt cheap 64-bit driver compatible entry level GPU used, or say $35-$40 for a brand new one.

I don't think 32 bit gpu's even exist... Maybe you refer to 32 bit drivers? But even in this case it's a different thing, kernel drivers could be 64bit only as far I know, the Linux kernel drivers does not require 32 bit kernel drivers for 32 bit apps

 

but anyway I'm pretty sure GPU have their own instruction set, what in this specific case GPU-related will be missing are OpenGL and Vulkan implementations and userspace drivers for interface with 32bit applications

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I don't think 32 bit gpu's even exist... Maybe you refer to 32 bit drivers? But even in this case it's a different thing, kernel drivers could be 64bit only as far I know, the Linux kernel drivers does not require 32 bit kernel drivers for 32 bit apps

 

but anyway I'm pretty sure GPU have their own instruction set, what in this specific case GPU-related will be missing are OpenGL and Vulkan implementations and userspace drivers for interface with 32bit applications

Don't ask me, ask will, he was the one who brought up the scenario.

4 hours ago, will1432 said:

what if I play games who aren't in development? what if a video card neads a 32bit driver who uses those libraries? I can see lots of people who would want this to at least be a download somewhere.

 

[DrMacintosh]

This is just like macOS Catalina. 

[The King of the Undead]

41 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I don't think 32 bit gpu's even exist... Maybe you refer to 32 bit drivers? But even in this case it's a different thing, kernel drivers could be 64bit only as far I know, the Linux kernel drivers does not require 32 bit kernel drivers for 32 bit apps

 

but anyway I'm pretty sure GPU have their own instruction set, what in this specific case GPU-related will be missing are OpenGL and Vulkan implementations and userspace drivers for interface with 32bit applications

yes I was talking about drivers

[The King of the Undead]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

For option #1, playing old legacy games: You do what people who run old games that don't work on Windows 10 anymore - you either just run a legacy version of the OS, or you virtualize/emulate the OS.

 

In this case, all you need to do is stay on 18.04 and everything will still work.

 

For option #2? A 32-bit only GPU? We're talking ancient hardware then. Again, you're running an older OS then, or you're spending the $10-$20 to pick up a dirt cheap 64-bit driver compatible entry level GPU used, or say $35-$40 for a brand new one.

for option 1 yes but what if I play 1 legacy game and don't want to run a vm? what if your pc can not handle it (like mine) and you don't want to run on an old os just for this game? and I know just do not play the game but then you have lost all the joy you had from that game

[Chunchunmaru_]

7 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

This is just like macOS Catalina. 

I do still think that for Apple and apple developers are going to manage things better, they also announced this 1 year before

For ubuntu is just one distribution, and ok you can still use the LTS but not everyone will be using LTS especially for new hardware, where some GPU do not have support even for installs

 

Also linux distributions pretty much depends on wine for program support, which most of the time is 32 bit because windows is still using it, Apple has most of the time their own counterpart and better support at first from developers, and the company itself behind actually cares about the user base

Edited June 20, 2019 by Chunchunmaru_

[DrMacintosh]

4 minutes ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I do still think that for Apple and apple developers are going to manage things better, they also announced this 1 year before

The way I see it, if developers didn’t make the switch to 64bit by now, they are never going to and there should be no sympathy towards the developers who have abandoned their software like that. 

[The King of the Undead]

Just now, DrMacintosh said:

The way I see it, if developers didn’t make the switch to 64bit by now, they are never going to and there should be no sympathy towards the developers who have abandoned their software like that. 

what about the consumers? Why should they be punished for the developers choice to not spend money on converting?