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."

Comments

The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from too damn many linux distributions there is that too damn many developers run overpowered hardware and so their software is very wasteful of resources. Just look at any browser, really.

It'd be good to have at least one distribution that'll guarantee 32bit support for a decade or more, and does so with a basic but usable set of maintainable software to, well, get basically through the day with whatever you need. For there are still many places in the world that run on computer hardware a decade behind the cutting edge, and so come with well fewer computing, memory, disk, network, etc. resources than even the usual western hobbyist FOSS developer gives themselves to play with.

Test your software with a 512MB single core 1GHz 32bit desktop, and make it run decent in such an environment. There's a good dev.

Re:The problem

[Anonymous Coward]

My logic is if it's got less tracking and data mining builtin than a cell phone, it's probably not worth supporting.

Just because it's "new" doesn't mean the "old" needs to be destroyed. That mentality is how you get blind sighted and left vulnerable to various actors.

And yes, it's also how the famous "upgrade treadmill" keeps on chugging. I've seen entire projects go from working perfectly to completely useless on older hardware for no more reason than the developer wanted to replace a four line API call to some library with a one line API call in the "updated" library that deprecated support for the older hardware. It's BS, and incredibly wasteful. You wanna know where all of that ewaste comes from, ask a developer what new and shiny hand-holding framework they are toying with today. If they say some framework that depends on a runtime interpreter, you've found the problem.

I've got an older amd athlon64 floating around as a PBX / print server. It used to be a i686, but after the distros stopped supporting the i686, it became a Win98 retrogaming machine. It could still do work related tasks, heck it could still act as the PBX / print server if I reinstalled the older distro, but the distros refuse to provide security updates, and as such the hardware cannot be used for server tasks anymore. I don't have a need for multiple retrogaming rigs, so I guess when the amd64s start being deprecated, I'll keep one for retrogaming, and the rest will end up as environmental pollutants. I need to figure out where the maintainers live, so I can pollute their area with ewaste instead of mine.

Re: Thus, perfectly good hardware goes to scrap

[Anonymous Coward]

who the fuck wants to run linux on a consumer device other than you morons anyways. its a server os plain and simple... there will never be a year of the desktop for linux... get over it

Moving to ARM

[pi_rules]

I've got about 24 32 bit Atom boxes running a 32 bit Ubuntu (xubuntu) in a point of sale situation. The various distros dropping 32 bit support sort of gives me a reason to get off them, as if I needed a better one than they're 7 years old. I'm just moving them all to pi systems. That little ARM with 1 gig of RAM pulls just about as well as the Atom boxes did. I can't see much of a reason to keep anything on Atom with ARM SoCs being so low power. By now they all have to be getting up near 6-7 years old like mine.