i386 architecture will be dropped starting with Ubuntu 19.10

It makes more sense when you look at the history: i386 has been around for going on three decades and was originally the only x86 architecture. When the world started to go 64-bit, Intel was pushing Itanium as IA-64 as the top-performance option which could go head to head with high-end 64-bit RISC processors such as Alpha, PA-RISC, PowerPC, SPARC, etc. They attempted to rebrand x86 as IA-32 as a marketing exercise to match IA-64, both to demarcate it as the lesser architecture and to continue making the competing x86 vendors look less legitimate to business customers.

AMD was the first to develop and announce a 64-bit x86 extension back in 1999 and since they shipped the first hardware, the amd64 name distinguished it from Intel's IA-64. When Intel wrote off IA-64 and adopted AMD's extensions the “amd64” name was already used in a number of places.

So the compiled kernel potentially misses out on instructions that newer CPUs support?

IA-32 would imply it'd run in any IA-32 processor, the same as i386 since later versions are backwards compatible up to there, so they're functionally the same.

It won't run in i486 or i386, though, so they're both inaccurate names

And they'll be outdated compared to their 64-bit counterparts.

Just use a VM with an old version of Ubuntu is not a solution.

To be fair, Arch dropped i686 years ago. How many people are really stuck on 32 bit? & if companies are so quick to axe things, why is Windows still offered on 32-bit where it'll run many 16-bit programs?

Your post is really slanted "upgrading to Debian", "Company vs Community", suggesting that profit goes against the user's best interest

I'm writing this as someone who uses Arch at home & Debian at work

I know i have 3 years but... new toys ;)

Thanks for the suggestion (amazon reviewers aren't so happy with it though). I want a motherboard not a NUC-like system though. Still using sata, running some servers on it etc.

Random example of bad news here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/877703/only-32-bit-distros-a...

The CPU may be, but the bios and motherboard... possibly not so much. The system is pretty old and could use a replacement anyway before it croaks on me.

Which libraries? I recall having to pull in a whole 32-bit system on Arch Linux to install Steam’s binary package.

When there's a will there's a way.

Personally I would go for unpacking the 64bit userland+packages in a subdirectory, boot once into a rescue userland which just switches the directories around, then boot normally.

GRUB already has support for "boot once in this alternate configuration", so it's all there.

As I said, I'm running 64 bit hardware, and a 64 bit kernel.

But shifting the packages from 32 bit to 64 bit is not supported automatically.

And that despite the ability to install both 32 and 64 bit packages side by side.

It's like they did all the hard part for the upgrade, and just didn't finish that last little bit (find 64 bit versions of existing 32 bit packages, and install them, then remove the 32 bit).

I actually did this with a debian sid a few years back. I guess I got attached to that trusty system which I moved from PC to PC for years and had a few too many customization.

With my latest PC I went with a clean install though.

I don't have a new system, I would need to do it in place, on the same system.

I guess I should have clarified that I already have a 64 bit CPU, and 64 bit kernel, but my initial installation is 20 or more years old and has been updated since then, from that same initial installation. (It's even the same initial ext3 filesystem, since I used md raid to shift the installation to new hard disks over time, it used to be ext2, but that upgrade was automatic.)

Debian has the ability to have both 32 and 64 bit packages installed side-by-side.

I.e. they did the hard part. I just need some way to automatically shift each package to its 64 bit equivalent, then remove the 32 bit one, and eventually the libraries too once nothing depends on them.

I've been running, and recommending, Debian for over 20 years. I've contributed to it via bug reports and patches as much as I was able to.

I even used to have a [minor] package I maintained there (it's gone now).

The feature almost exists, Debian can run both 32 and 64 bit versions of a package side-by-side.

Many things, none of them good if you have 2 Gb of RAM, 2 cores and no graphics acceleration. Chromium works really well in this kind of hardware specially with javascript blocked.

The other way to view this is as rich software developers asking the rest of the world to pay to upgrade their hardware, or else forgo security patches. That may be hard if you're in a poor country, or are otherwise living near the poverty line.

Commercial interests have little incentive to serve this demographic, due to their lack of buying power. That leaves open source projects that were created for the public good.

Not the second one.

No, but I imagine this decision will have implications for lighter derivatives such as Lubuntu.

> If you're still running pre-2005 hardware, is the latest

> version of Ubuntu even really running that well at all?

Ubuntu server and Lubuntu are still very agreeable for older hardware.

> Besides, they can continue to use 19.04 or 18.04 LTS. It's

> not like discontinuing support means existing installs are

> going to break.

After just a few versions of Ubuntu it becomes harder to find archive repositories, especially if you want to do anything like cross-compiling. It basically is a death sentence.

I suspet my 5-watt fitlet outperforms most P4s

Your points are valid. I should replace it with something really cheap and power efficient (although at least in the winter this isn't an issue).

I just have a psychological aversion to replacing something that is still fulfilling its job.

Looks like it. Check the article link, and these:

> Q. Doesn’t Steam use 32 bit libraries? How can I play my games?

> Q. How can I run 32-bit Windows applications if 32-bit WINE isn’t available in the archive?

It means they are dropping 32-bit packages for good, not just the distro.

I'm using GOG, not Steam. They don't commonly rely on bundled runtime. Proposed solutions with lxc and such are quite annoying. And it's not about 32-bit Wine, it's about WoW64 Wine requiring 32-bit libraries to run 32-bit stuff. Lot's of older games are 32-bit and will never be converted to 64-bit.

If there is no 32-bit multiarch, how are we supposed to build 32-bit Mesa and dxvk / d9vk for example? And if we can't, everything will be stuck with outdated versions. It's a huge mess they are pushing for. I hope Debain won't do this horror if they can avoid it.