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Lubuntu, a Popular Ubuntu Flavor, To Stop Providing 32-Bit Releases (betanews.com)
Lubuntu, a popular Ubuntu flavor which announced earlier this year that it would stop supporting old hardware, is now dropping support for 32-bit x86 releases. BetaNews adds: "Lubuntu has been and continues to be the go-to Ubuntu flavor for people who want the most from their computers, especially older hardware that cannot handle today's workloads. However, the project and computing as a whole has drastically changed in many ways since its origin ten years ago. Computers have become faster, more secure, and most notably, have moved off of the traditional 32-bit i686 (generalized as i386 in Debian and Ubuntu) architecture," says Simon Quigley, Lubuntu.
Quigley further says , "As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021."
Quigley further says , "As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021."
Is Gentoo a viable option these days?
Mostly, yes. There are some WTF decisions to drop standard well-working packages because they haven't received any updates in a long time (if it works as intended with no logged bugs, why require updates?), and some dependency problems, but overall, it works fairly well, also for i686 (i386 is no longer supported).
My main server is a PIII-S, running 32-bit Gentoo just fine. Things were built to last back then, and I think it's more likely that it will still be running in five years time than the much newer Xeon server next to it.
Think of Lubuntu as "lightweight ubuntu." Debian creates most of the base, Canonical polishes most of what's left and adds in some goodies and releases Ubuntu as its main distro with the Gnome Desktop Environment. Then, Canonical and/or their partners also support other "flavors" of Ubuntu which use other Desktop Environments. Think of the DE as just another program - the user interface is just a shell over the rest of the OS.
Some examples:
Kubuntu -- KDE Plasma desktop
Lubuntu -- LXQT desktop
Xubuntu -- XFCE desktop
Ubuntu Mate -- Mate desktop
Ubuntu Budgie -- Budgie desktop
There are often a few other changes to preferred programs like text editors, terminal viewers, file managers, etc. that come with the Desktop environments. Lubuntu, being a lightweight distro meant for older machines with fewer resources especially has some changes to default installations - mostly replacing Ubuntu's default programs with other smaller, less resource-hungry programs so that you can get the most out of a system with a small hard drive and low RAM.
It's still a lot of work to maintain the differences in the packages and the separate desktop environments, but the differences in the Ubuntu flavors largely come down to selecting between a few swappable programs - you can even install a different desktop environment and uninstall your original one and effectively change flavors -- since they're all built on the same basic Ubuntu base built on the same Debian base.
You could think of Lubuntu as a partnership between Debian, Canonical, the LXQT team, and everyone else that contributes to the GNU/LINUX operating system. I don't know the breakdown of funding, but as it's supported by Canonical, I suspect most of the funding is supported the same as the regular Ubuntu release with LXQT mostly supporting their desktop environment.