32 bits

[wildmanne39]

That miscommunication has taken the tech press by storm. If there are corrections to be made, they will need to travel far beyond this forum. Steam is supposedly dropping Ubuntu support over this. Wine is concerned as well.

Indeed, but I am sure Canonical will work it out.

[oneleded]

@ The Fubut; 31-bit was used on IBM 370s, which was crazy popular.
i thought there was something not quite with with mostly 2 squared, an beyond, being used.
maybe just using the prime number's? Hmmm 37
or maybe multible's of 42

[mastablasta]

That miscommunication has taken the tech press by storm. If there are corrections to be made, they will need to travel far beyond this forum. Steam is supposedly dropping Ubuntu support over this. Wine is concerned as well.

Indeed, but I am sure Canonical will work it out.

"PR & marketing is easy, anyone can do it.", they said. same goes for sales etc. seen some brilliant engineers take over these things in projects they were assigned (or volunteered for) only to be brought to the ground by the market. hard.

in any case i do hope they will continue to offer the 32 bit libraries.

i am upset that they declared the main reason to be a financial one. but (at first glance) the pros clearly outweigh the cons and the financial part could have been resolved by crowdfunding, marketing or asking interested parties for funding. surely we are not talking about a million Euros per year. can one person maintain this? if yes, how much would it cost to hire them for a year?

i can understand they do not want to package the 32 bit apps, but the libraries that are used for backwards driver compatibility, wine, games... must stay. windows understands backwards compatibility, while in linux we have hardware compatibility dropped and now (it seems) software.

i am still crossing my fingers that they keep the libraries around at least until we get hardware that can run some kind of 32Box emulator. i doubt this will happen any time soon. the jumps in PC computing power are not as big as they were back in the 90's and 00's.

[mastablasta]

well.... not sure if this will calm anyone down.

Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS:
https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on...-and-20-04-lts

also is Debian dropping support? aren't these packages the same in both OS?

[Artim]

Debian isn't dropping 32-bit support yet.

[vanquishedangel]

Honestly my opinion on this:

OK guys just to point out, the first mass produced 64 bit processors will now be 16 years years old (actually some are older) Any ones computer these days is capable of 64 bit, and therefore should be running a 64bit OS already. If you decided not to run a 64 bit OS knowing it will eventually replace 32 bit, and it has been announced for years now that this will happen, it is your fault.
As for programs not running in 64 bit, almost all do nowadays, and if a developer has not made their program 64 bit capable by now, it is that developers fault and you need to get on them about it, they are keeping us in archaic technology.
As for wine games, wine still runs 16 bit games fine and support has been gone for 16 bit forever now, so I think that will be fine.
The cost to maintain 32 bit when most are now on 64 bit, is outweighing the benefits of keeping it. I think they are dropping their 32 bit os, and they should be.

[uRock]

Honestly my opinion on this:

OK guys just to point out, the first mass produced 64 bit processors will now be 16 years years old (actually some are older) Any ones computer these days is capable of 64 bit, and therefore should be running a 64bit OS already. If you decided not to run a 64 bit OS knowing it will eventually replace 32 bit, and it has been announced for years now that this will happen, it is your fault.
As for programs not running in 64 bit, almost all do nowadays, and if a developer has not made their program 64 bit capable by now, it is that developers fault and you need to get on them about it, they are keeping us in archaic technology.
As for wine games, wine still runs 16 bit games fine and support has been gone for 16 bit forever now, so I think that will be fine.
The cost to maintain 32 bit when most are now on 64 bit, is outweighing the benefits of keeping it. I think they are dropping their 32 bit os, and they should be.

This reminds me of why I stopped using Windows. I have hardware that was no longer supported when Windows 7 came out and even more hardware that became unsupported with Windows 10. Linux has always been advertised as being able to run on older hardware, but now we're supposed to just toss our hardware?

On the software side of things; While working at one of my previous employers I would get calls from people still using Windows XP, because they had custom software that would cost thousands to have rewritten to work on newer systems. I empathized with those people and I still do today.

People should not have to throw things away just because there's something newer. It is wasteful.

[oneleded]

I bought a gaming motherboard once, because my nephew used my computer. then he got a laptop, right after, and no longer used my PC. it is a S-series GICABYTE. i cant game.. anyhow, it runs 32 32/64 64 bits. still, it dont solve a problem if 32 bit, is not supported, i suppose.

[mastablasta]

People should not have to throw things away just because there's something newer. It is wasteful.

i have windows XP on my PC, i added a new disk where i installed Kubuntu to it. I bought the PC in 2004 with the intention of replacing the CPU later on with Phenom. I didn't do that so now i am stuck with single core AMD64. It had a few smaller upgrades and replacements (PSU, GPU, hard disk), but overall the configuration remained the same (e.g. replaced GPU has similar computing power, just a bit more ram). now the PC does all i need it to do. sure it is not the fastest (benchmark is about 500 points, compared to nowadays 10.000+ points), but it can do web browsing well, i can do online banking on it, tax return submissions, office work, picture editing, videos (watching and editing up to a point)... it can even run most directx9 as well as games up to about 2013 (but it depends on their GPU and CPU demands). i don't have that much time for games these days, but the kids do and they would use it for that. i also enjoy it sometimes to relax a bit.

so why should i throw it away if it works and works well for my needs? i though it would die and have been planning on getting a new one for a while, but it just keeps on working. also spending 60 EUR on a new 80 bronze PSU replacement is cheaper than getting a new 400 EUR PC.

[CatKiller]

i have windows XP on my PC, i added a new disk where i installed Kubuntu to it. I bought the PC in 2004 with the intention of replacing the CPU later on with Phenom. I didn't do that so now i am stuck with single core AMD64.

Unsurprisingly, an AMD64 processor is perfectly capable of running software compiled for the AMD64 architecture. The fact that distros are starting to no longer provide i386 install images won't affect this 15-year-old computer in the slightest.