I think it'd be a huge mistake for Canonical not to reverse their direction on this. The original decision was defensible when it wasn't obvious how many problems dropping 32 bit support would create, but obviously it's a big issue to a lot of their customers.
It become popular in the cloud because it was popular in the desktop.
Ubuntu and Canonical jumped on AWS quickly and started to generate supported images that people liked that gave them fresh stuff that they couldn't really get with Amazon Linux and RHEL was still stuck in the 90's enterprise pricing model, so Ubuntu was a natural fit there.
Sadly, most Ubuntu users are on mac clients, and Canonical isn't going to care about 1 laptop when they need to spend the money to support the millions of instances that one laptop is spawning on AWS, Azure, GCP.
The few "linux desktop" people who are left will still have the same desktop, as long as they get their vscode, docker, cloud tools, and a terminal/ssh they won't care much.
"The few "linux desktop" people who are left"
Citation needed.
Supporting something with 900,000 users seems, at the very least, somewhat compelling. Especially since they were already doing it. It's not like they have to actively recruit these people, but what they're definitely doing is telling them to f-off.
Also, this isn't just losing Steam: wine apps with 32 bit installers is a major source of software.
I know personally I actually do want to use a Linux distro now that Unity 3D support is coming, and Ubuntu would have been my first choice, but I know I'm definitely going elsewhere now :-/
If anything loss leaders are more important for platforms, since learning a platform is a big time investment and people will reach for what they know when the time comes to choose something.
I can't claim to know if this was the right economic decision for Canonical because it's a very complicated question, but what I can say with certainty is they just gave 900,000+ people a reason not to use their platform, along with sending a strong signal to a lot of observers that might be thinking about investing time in their platform. Is the engineering time they save going to gain them something that makes them attractive to 900,000 new users? That's a lot of people to appeal to.
So those improvements are just a nice to have thing, unless they changed direction.
I get pissed every time a service drops support for something I haven't updated in 5 years, but as a business owner, I also actively discontinue services that cause more headache than revenue. It's simply specialization.
Convincing someone else, like valve to do some or all of the work would have avoided the negative PR that Canonical ate.
The linux desktop has always been a loss leader to getting inroads into the server space with paying customers.
> Where's Steam going to go? How can they be certain that whatever distro they switch to won't eventually abandon 32 bit? (I mean, I guarantee they will.). Will they then go back to Ubuntu? Or a third distro, then a fourth.... Why don't they just fix their problem now and get it over with?
Well, look at it from this perspective: from a technical perspective this is hard to solve, and the project that they use in order to make this possible (Wine) seems to be lost on fixing this. If Valve doesn't make much money off selling Linux games, they're not going to invest resources to fix this problem Ubuntu has just created. The big loser here is Ubuntu users. And the "fix" involves fixing 32-bit Windows binaries, which from a practical standpoint none of the companies that were only releasing Windows binaries in the first place are ever going to fix this. This isn't about games, this is about software compatibility, and Ubuntu just announced they don't care that much about it.
Valve doesn't care as long as SOME distro supports what they're doing, and there's definitely going to be some distro that says, yes, supporting gaming is worth it to us. Also, if you care about Linux on the desktop, companies like Valve are who you WANT on your side. The last thing you want to do is alienate a company like that, and have other companies say: "well, look what happened when Valve tried to support linux"
If you're building a platform, which is what Ubuntu is, the last thing you want to say to potential users is: "you can't do what you want here". Games may not make Ubuntu money and they may not be on the radar of a lot of users, but being "the platform that's bad for gaming" and "the platform that can't run Wine apps" is a bad look.
Also consider who has the leverage? Valve is offering a massive catalog of games that can't be easily obtained any other way. Ubuntu is is competing with other distros, Windows, and older versions of their own software. And they have virtually zero lock in -- if I want to use a different linux distro it's pretty easy. If I want to get the games that Steam offers in an alternative fashion, on the other hand, in most cases I'm SOL.
So Ubuntu has essentially zero leverage here, and worse they're shooting themselves in the foot for no reason, since nobody forced this on them. As the article states, Debian still supports this, so in a sense they're going out of their way to make life more difficult for their users.
What massive catalog for 1% of desktop consumers?
I've been experience a similar issue trying to get people to migrate off Python 2.7. And managers keep prioritizing features over the "long game".
Now if you say they're prioritizing the platforms with the larger customer bases, that makes more sense. And it's not the long game, its just enhancing the profitable side.
Nobody is going to recompile thousands of 10 year old windows games just to please a bunch of gamers on Ubuntu.
Other distro's have already went this route without the world burning down.
Canonical has, yet again, made a mistake here if they care about the desktop at all. Sure, 32-bit x86 hardware is pretty much obsolete. All 32-bit software? Not so much. Seems like the reasonable compromise would be to identify the subset of 32-bit packages/libraries needed to support Wine/Steam and continue to maintain those rather than the entire 32-bit version of the distro.
Serious question, I actually don't know.
If Valve supports some distro, then it'll be possible to put that in a container and run it on Ubuntu. That part could probably be automated, and users may not even notice the difference.
You can easily directly expose the underlying hardware to a container, and it is in fact very much possible to run games from a container.
And I say this as someone who ran games on NixOS inside an Ubuntu container as a workaround (because nix is pretty weird when it comes to dynamic linking).
If someone asks the question "what distro should I use for gaming on Linux", the answer is usually "any is fine, but Ubuntu's probably the safest option". With this decision, the answer becomes "literally anything but Ubuntu". Ubuntu became popular because of good sentiment and word of mouth. And the same geeks trying out Ubuntu on their laptops are the ones who end up making the decisions on what distro their company should use on their servers/VMs too.
I don't know how much general popularity really helps them, maybe it really is irrelevant, and if everyone stopped using it on desktop tomorrow they'd still retain their popularity in server/cloud. But I feel like the only reason they became popular on servers is because they're popular on desktop. There aren't many reasons to use Ubuntu over RHEL or some variant on servers, except that more people will go "oh yeah, I've used Ubuntu before, I know how to use apt".