Valve going to end official support for Ubuntu starting from 19.10

[Chunchunmaru_]

Summary: Ubuntu recently announced to be dropping 32bit library support in the upcoming versions starting from 19.10 as already discussed in this forum  

 

On a tweet, a Valve developer contrary to what was known before, they were working with Ubuntu to eventually release a compatibility library in their runtime, said:

Quote

Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users.

We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD." 

And valve is not the only one being so harsh to Ubuntu, even CodeWeavers, the company behind Wine the Windows emulator, which mainly supports 32bit only, said they were not going to build for Ubuntu and make a compatibility layer because of inconsistencies with the different 64bit system libraries that would make 

 

My opinion: As I already addressed in the previous thread, even if basically no one understood what I meant and why I was so skeptical about this, I expected this to be happening.

 

The Linux world has already issues on their own for desktops and since it depends on windows especially for gaming, and Microsoft is not going to drop 32bit anytime soon, I was almost sure this would hurt.

 

I was also being told Windows installers have a LOT of 32 bit dependencies generally.

 

As neither Wine or Steam is going to officially support Ubuntu, it's all in the hand of the community to do (or not) something about, that would probably take a reasonable amount of time causing harm to users. For some people not using Ubuntu is not an alternative.

 

Ubuntu is the most supported distros at all, and seeing those big giants dropping support for it is certainly not good, this fragmentation is not going to help at all, I would like to be optimistic like the folks in the previous thread but we'll just see what will happen in the future I guess. I highly doubt since I'm present and interested basically all development groups related to gaming, the resources are actually focused on other things which tbh really matter.

 

LTS would also not be the solution to everyone, as new graphics card are going to be out soon, the support on it is not going to be backported to the LTS soon and means most likely they won't even boot.

 

Same applies on laptops, and Ubuntu is the main supported distro by NVIDIA for easily switch between graphics card in Optimus laptops. And it's the only way to get Vulkan to work on Optimus since Bumblebee doesn't officially support Vulkan, and it's old and pretty much buggy (it's the solution present on Manjaro)

 

I also think generally is ok telling people to stop shipping 32bit dependencies on their programs, but Linux is not ready to this,

making life harder to developers and consumers, is not widespread on desktop as it deserves to be and is should be the last one to be dropping support for it, especially since I already said depends on Windows.

 

Like it or not, this is going to create problems and would be again behind Windows as an alternative before this situation would be improved, and considering the 19.10 release its only a matter of 3 months, time will just tell us.

 

Creating a solution in this case for a thirst party as I already said in another threads, is a cost which requires funding for storage and build farms, for only basic support

 

I don't think 3 months are enough honestly.

 

Also, this is not simple as it looks to address making less issues to users.

 

EDIT: I also forgot that programs cannot just ship their own Mesa drivers, as having different 32/64 bit drivers can lead to ABI break (probably) but I'm almost certainly sure it's the case for NVIDIA drivers, as they are not Mesa and use a different libGL from open source drivers...

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

[Spotty]

According to Steam's Hardware Survey only 0.07% of Steam users are using the most recent version of Ubuntu. Probably cheaper for Steam to lose those 0.07% customers than it is for them to rework their software to cater to them.

 

I'm sure Steam will go 64bit eventually, but Steam is working to their own schedule and Ubuntu isn't going to force them to change that.

[TetraSky]

It's 2019... What reason is there to still run a 32bit only OS in this day and age? Other than reviving old hardware? It's about time for softwares and games to be made with only 64bit in mind instead of cutting corners with 32bit dependencies just because a small minority of users are still on 32bit hardware/OSes only.

 

There's isn't even 2% of users still on 32bit windows on Steam. And none at all on 32bit Linux, or at least, according to the numbers shown by steam hardware survey. It'd be about time they upgrade. I get that some older games might not play nice with newer hardware/64bit OSes, but there's usually some workaround for those. Like emulators or virtual machines. 

 

Couldn't Ubuntu just put the 32bit dependencies in a separate optional package, to give users the option to have a lightweight 64bit only OS without those?

[Chunchunmaru_]

22 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

It's 2019... What reason is there to still run a 32bit only OS in this day and age? Other than reviving old hardware?

 

There's isn't even 2% of users still on 32bit windows on Steam. And none at all on 32bit Linux. (According to steam hardware survey)

Nope, it's not just 32bit support, it's 32bit support on 64bit called Multiarch, WoW64 on Windows

 

22 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

It's 2019... What reason is there to still run a 32bit only OS in this day and age? Other than reviving old hardware?

 

There's isn't even 2% of users still on 32bit windows on Steam. And none at all on 32bit Linux. (According to steam hardware survey)

Yeah pretty much my thought, but this should be happen only when Windows does this first as Steam Play focuses on Windows gaming and it's pretty common to find 32bit dependencies 

 

Also, 64bit only wine is useless... The amount of windows programs working without 32bit deps is very small, also some winetricks and net 2 requires 32bit as well

[Ashleyyyy]

15 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

It's 2019... What reason is there to still run a 32bit only OS in this day and age? 

the problem here is that 64-bit OS's are backwards compatible with 32-bit apps. that's why for example you can still play half life on a modern machine. 

 

64-bit apps have also been designed with this in mind and many use 32-bit components and at least on Linux shared libraries and dependencies that come from the 32-bit repo's. 

 

by killing 32-bit Ubuntu have also broken all of those programs, including old games and pretty much the entirety of Wine. 

[Arika]

soooo, is there any reason to chose Ubuntu over any of the derivative distros at this point?

[Chunchunmaru_]

Just now, Arika S said:

soooo, is there any reason to chose Ubuntu over any of the derivative distros at this point?

As I said decent Nvidia Optimus support on laptops... Most laptops out there basically 

 

Bumblebee present on other distros: buggy, no GUI, no Vulkan (so dxvk) support, and not officially supported by Nvidia 

 

That's why it's just harmful to Linux usability in general, there is no point of choosing it for gaming instead of Windows unless you want your life complicated, it wasn't that much before at this point honestly...

[Doobeedoo]

32-bit OSs should've stop being a thing for a while now. Dragging legacy support and such I'm surprised we haven't moved from it yet. 

[Tenelia]

*laughs in Arch*

[Jito463]

1 hour ago, TetraSky said:

It's 2019... What reason is there to still run a 32bit only OS in this day and age?

30 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

32-bit OSs should've stop being a thing for a while now.

Ubuntu stopped releasing 32-bit versions of their distro several years ago, this is them dropping the ability run 32-bit programs in your 64-bit OS.  You know, the whole reason we have the AMD64/x86-64 extension in the first place, so that 32-bit and 64-bit can coexist.

[Sauron]

1 hour ago, Spotty said:

According to Steam's Hardware Survey only 0.07% of Steam users are using the most recent version of Ubuntu. Probably cheaper for Steam to lose those 0.07% customers than it is for them to rework their software to cater to them.

 

I'm sure Steam will go 64bit eventually, but Steam is working to their own schedule and Ubuntu isn't going to force them to change that.

There's a community maintained Steam package on Flathub which makes this issue non existent.

[jasonvp]

2 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

this is them dropping the ability run 32-bit programs in your 64-bit OS.  You know, the whole reason we have the AMD64/x86-64 extension in the first place, so that 32-bit and 64-bit can coexist.

The outrage over this is comical at best.  Once again: mountain out of a mole hill.

 

1.  If folks expect a company to continue supporting old 32-bit games/legacy applications, then it's time those folks got a clue.  It's silly to expect any company to continue doing that.

 

2.  If developers are too busy to get their apps running as proper 64-bit, then it's up to them to provide a way for the apps to run in an environment that doesn't support 32-bit.  Hello, static linking?  Yeah, that works.

 

Carry on.

 

[dalekphalm]

My opinion from the original thread still stands. Valve needs to provide the libraries themselves - which would fix the problem.

 

Canonical offering an optional package would just enable devs to keep using the 32-bit libraries - not just for old software and games, but for new software - which would in turn just prolong the issue.

 

In the long run, this is good for Ubuntu. Any still actively developed software that needs the 32-bit libraries can just provide them during install.

[Doobeedoo]

9 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

Ubuntu stopped releasing 32-bit versions of their distro several years ago, this is them dropping the ability run 32-bit programs in your 64-bit OS.  You know, the whole reason we have the AMD64/x86-64 extension in the first place, so that 32-bit and 64-bit can coexist.

Right, I just meant to say that why continue creating 32-bit programs anymore though. Many are currently offering both and many switched to 64bit only. 

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

LTS would also not be the solution to everyone, as new graphics card are going to be out soon, the support on it is not going to be backported to the LTS soon and means most likely they won't even boot.

That's not really how it works, it wouldn't prevent a system from booting either. The distribution of Ubuntu and the graphics drivers aren't fixed to each other like that, as long as the requisite driver is available in the repo you can install it and there is no reason this change to Ubuntu would effect graphics drivers for other releases especially an LTS.

 

This is the whole point of Linux, it's modular. Want to upgrade the Linux kernel, sure no problem. Want to install the latest build of software, sure no problem.

 

Nvidia isn't going to stop building 32bit compatible drivers just because 19.10 has removed 32bit support.

 

Sure it's a problem for people that want to always run the newest thing but LTS is a viable long term option while you wait to see how this plays out.

[Jito463]

18 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Canonical offering an optional package would just enable devs to keep using the 32-bit libraries

 

18 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Any still actively developed software that needs the 32-bit libraries can just provide them during install.

Do you not realize the irony in these two statements?  You're complaining that devs will continue using 32-bit libraries, while arguing that devs should continue using 32-bit libraries if they need them.

[Trixanity]

4 minutes ago, Jito463 said:

 

Do you not realize the irony in these two statements?  You're complaining that devs will continue using 32-bit libraries, while arguing that devs should continue using 32-bit libraries if they need them.

I'd say both yes and no. People follow the path of least resistance. Developers might think twice about being lazy and just sticking to 32 bit if it requires them to do extra work to support the application(s) versus migrating to 64 bit going forward. I get the feeling that many people just do things because that's how they've always done them hence we still have apps relying on 32 bit libraries to this day (not counting unsupported legacy apps). If 32 bit is absolutely necessary then you'll just have to work around it otherwise just fix your stuff and transition to 64 bit.

[descendency]

2 hours ago, Spotty said:

According to Steam's Hardware Survey only 0.07% of Steam users are using the most recent version of Ubuntu. Probably cheaper for Steam to lose those 0.07% customers than it is for them to rework their software to cater to them.

 

I'm sure Steam will go 64bit eventually, but Steam is working to their own schedule and Ubuntu isn't going to force them to change that.

The problem is less likely Steam and more likely what Steam puts on the PC (games). 

[Sauron]

59 minutes ago, Tenelia said:

*laughs in Arch*

Arch hasn't supported 32bit libraries out of the box for years.

 

It's almost as though this doesn't actually mean you can't run 32 bit software if you really need to.

1 hour ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

As I said decent Nvidia Optimus support on laptops... Most laptops out there basically 

 

Bumblebee present on other distros: buggy, no GUI, no Vulkan (so dxvk) support, and not officially supported by Nvidia 

 

That's why it's just harmful to Linux usability in general, there is no point of choosing it for gaming instead of Windows unless you want your life complicated, it wasn't that much before at this point honestly...

But... there already was no reason to use Ubuntu over Windows if all you care about are the games.

2 hours ago, firelighter487 said:

the problem here is that 64-bit OS's are backwards compatible with 32-bit apps. that's why for example you can still play half life on a modern machine.

You can still play half life because it's statically linked. 32bit binaries will still be compatible with Ubuntu as long as they aren't dynamically linked to libraries that will no longer be available.

2 hours ago, Arika S said:

soooo, is there any reason to chose Ubuntu over any of the derivative distros at this point?

There has never been unless you preferred its UI, default features and release model - plus the couple of highly specific frameworks that only work well on Ubuntu, e.g. ROS, but that's not what we're talking about here (I don't remember if ROS uses 32 bit libraries but people who use it are mostly still on 16.04 anyway).

2 hours ago, Chunchunmaru_ said:

I also think generally is ok telling people to stop shipping 32bit dependencies on their programs, but Linux is not ready to this,

making life harder to developers and consumers, is not widespread on desktop as it deserves to be and is should be the last one to be dropping support for it, especially since I already said depends on Windows.

I don't think we should chase popularity in exchange for progress. Windows is a trash heap in large part due to its retrocompatibility constraints.

[wasab]

Since when is official support ever an issue on Linux? *Wink wink

[Chunchunmaru_]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

That's not really how it works, it wouldn't prevent a system from booting either. The distribution of Ubuntu and the graphics drivers aren't fixed to each other like that, as long as the requisite driver is available in the repo you can install it and there is no reason this change to Ubuntu would effect graphics drivers for other releases especially an LTS.

 

This is the whole point of Linux, it's modular. Want to upgrade the Linux kernel, sure no problem. Want to install the latest build of software, sure no problem.

 

Nvidia isn't going to stop building 32bit compatible drivers just because 19.10 has removed 32bit support.

 

Sure it's a problem for people that want to always run the newest thing but LTS is a viable long term option while you wait to see how this plays out.

You didn't get my point...

 

LTS ship with LTS kernels, and support from new hardware comes only with backported which takes time, and they don't refresh the ISO anyway that frequent 

 

And by default the design is pretty crappy, for unsupported graphics chipset the nouveau driver comes in even when it's not remotely supported instead of the vesa driver, which would let you install an updated kernel with working drivers

 

Oh unless people want to dig with the CLI

[Brooksie359]

45 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Arch hasn't supported 32bit libraries out of the box for years.

 

It's almost as though this doesn't actually mean you can't run 32 bit software if you really need to.

But... there already was no reason to use Ubuntu over Windows if all you care about are the games.

You can still play half life because it's statically linked. 32bit binaries will still be compatible with Ubuntu as long as they aren't dynamically linked to libraries that will no longer be available.

There has never been unless you preferred its UI, default features and release model - plus the couple of highly specific frameworks that only work well on Ubuntu, e.g. ROS, but that's not what we're talking about here (I don't remember if ROS uses 32 bit libraries but people who use it are mostly still on 16.04 anyway).

I don't think we should chase popularity in exchange for progress. Windows is a trash heap in large part due to its retrocompatibility constraints.

Yeah I don't think linux is very good at chasing at popularity. If it wasn't for its uses in applications like servers and non standard desktop use cases it would have been dead a long time ago. 

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Yeah I don't think linux is very good at chasing at popularity. If it wasn't for its uses in applications like servers and non standard desktop use cases it would have been dead a long time ago. 

The vast majority of computers worldwide use Linux. The vast majority of phones use Linux. What we're talking about here is desktop Linux, which is good specifically because it's different from Windows - trying to be Windows will just make it equally bad and not actually succeed in doing the few things that Windows does well.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

Here's the thing though: AFAIK Debian still has 32bit support, even in their 64bit installs.  Seeing as Ubuntu is based on Debian, this move means that Cannonical actually has to spend time and resources to remove the 32bit support from the OS they start with.   

I understand if they feel that their OS is bloated, because it clearly is.  Anyone who has recently used Ubuntu will have to admit that Ubuntu 14 was the last good version.  I can only applaud them for actually trying to slim it down again.  However removing 32bit support isn't going to solve the problem because the problem is caused by all the other crap they added over the years.

[Chunchunmaru_]

2 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

My opinion from the original thread still stands. Valve needs to provide the libraries themselves - which would fix the problem.

 

Canonical offering an optional package would just enable devs to keep using the 32-bit libraries - not just for old software and games, but for new software - which would in turn just prolong the issue.

 

In the long run, this is good for Ubuntu. Any still actively developed software that needs the 32-bit libraries can just provide them during install.

They just said they won't

 

canonical won't either as they are not even thinking of building for i386 anymore

 

is good for people to going back to windows tbh 

 

 

2 hours ago, jasonvp said:

The outrage over this is comical at best.  Once again: mountain out of a mole hill.

 

1.  If folks expect a company to continue supporting old 32-bit games/legacy applications, then it's time those folks got a clue.  It's silly to expect any company to continue doing that.

 

2.  If developers are too busy to get their apps running as proper 64-bit, then it's up to them to provide a way for the apps to run in an environment that doesn't support 32-bit.  Hello, static linking?  Yeah, that works.

 

Carry on.

 

Maybe that was a worth statement for someone like Microsoft, at this moment Linux desktop distributions must rely on Wine for decent software support and everything done as a lesson to lazy developers is just making them laugh.

 

This is not a discussion whether or not is right to deprecate an old architecture because the answer is simple

On Linux it will just hurt the user base

 

Good luck building a project with wine all static LMAO, how do you expect integrating video, audio and userspace drivers?

 

And if I don't get wrong, wine cannot be build under static by design, 6 years ago I was in their devel about a similar question