Hacker News Reader

Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

I haven't had the time to dig into this drama over the past few days. I personally don't care about support for a physical 32-bit processor machine, I just want to be able to run old games, EEPROM writer software, and handful of software for patching old instruments, on my 10 year old 64-bit machine. Will that still be doable?

View on HN

The implication is that if the 32bit libraries are frozen in time forever, emulators, wine[0] and some game platforms will soon become incompatible with Ubuntu.

If that's the case, it's dishonest to say "oh we're not killing 32bit" when in fact they're boiling the frog.

This has pissed off Valve enough to make vaguely threatening statements about stepping away from Ubuntu.

[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/i386-architecture-will-be-dro...

No longer vague. They're ending support for Ubuntu. https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/22/steam-will-stop-supporti...

And Debian is not stepping away from 32-bit? So we can all just move to Debian or a derivative if we liked Ubuntu?

For a while at least... the drama is exactly the use case you're describing: supporting old software/peripherals (esp. 32-bit apps for Wine/Steam.) If Ubuntu freezes 32-bit libraries at the current versions, it's likely that they will start to bit-rot as the 64-bit side of things move forward. This would likely manifest in things starting to break over time since Wine/Steam/whatever aren't likely to maintain/backport fixes to work around issues going forward for out of date packages.

Can you send me the EEPROM writer software? I'll be able to tell you what's needed to run it.

Most likely, things will keep working as is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com