After a bit of a rollercoaster weekend, Canonical has decided to support “selected” 32-bit packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Previously, it was announced that Ubuntu 19.10 would stop maintaining their 32-bit packages. This move would critically damage the ability to run 32-bit applications on those versions of Ubuntu. They will now be supported throughout the lifecycle for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which ends in April 2030.
This brings me to an interesting point: Why did they originally plan to deprecate support in 19.10? Would it not make more sense to cut support for a massive category of software on an LTS version? Why would they force early adopters of 18.10 and 19.04 to roll back to 18.04 to get long-term 32-bit support? This whole decision really made no sense.
Of course, Ubuntu took some lashings over the weekend for it. Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve Software said that Ubuntu 19.10 (and later) would not support Steam. To better understand the gravity of this announcement, note that SteamOS is a cousin of Ubuntu, as both are based on the Debian line of Linux distributions. The WINE development team has also discussed dropping Ubuntu 19.10.
While this will give a bit more time for Ubuntu users, I’m curious about long-term harm to Ubuntu. The barrier in front of switching Linux distros is not too high, and the way this announcement rolled out was awful.
What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments.
It definitely made no sense. First they aimed only 1% of users would be affected. They didn’t specify if that was x86 installs or x64 installs with 32 bit libraries for Linux Multiarch Support. It also hors directly against the whole reason for Ubuntu in the first place. It’s bug #1 on their tracker. Especially since debian has no such plans and are the upstream source of many of the packages.
To be clear, I would love for 64bit libraries to just accept and process the 32bit programs calls. But that ship sailed long ago when the powers that be decided that side by side libraries was the default.
Microsoft is the only company that put in the effort to produce a compatibility layer. Open source can’t hope to take over the desktop until they fix the existential library incompatibility. There ate so many open source programs that don’t on modern Ubuntu as they have slowly deprecated older versions of libraries those programs need.