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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."
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That's harder than it sounds. Nearly all open source software written in C++ is moving to newer standards fairly quickly. You have to use newer compilers. Some of those aren't well tested anymore in 32bit environments. Things break. Data types aren't set properly.
Most people expect modern web browsers and other software to continue to work. No OS project could guarantee that at this point. Unless we get a firm yes from Mozilla or Google, there will be no browser support soon. Even then, it's likely limited to one OS.
I get a lot of crap from people because I've had so much trouble keeping newer browsers going on my OS. They are massively complicated. It's as complex as OpenJDK, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, or KDE to port. I don't think people realize how big they are.
I haven't killed 32bit support because it's still quite popular, particularly with south american users. However, it's getting harder to maintain. I run it in a VM at this point usually 2GB ram and 2 cores because anything less is impossible to work with. It takes too long to compile software otherwise.
If an OS is targeting desktops, most of them have at least 4GB of RAM and a 64bit CPU now. Even 8 year old hardware is mostly 64bit aside from some netbooks. You can't run a browser with less than 2GB of RAM these days and have a good experience. Servers are another story. You actually have to target less memory usage there because of AWS EC2 sizes. Even smart phones and embedded devices have more ram than t2.micro/t2.nano EC2 instances now.
My logic is if it's got less cpu and ram than a cell phone, it's probably not worth supporting.
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