Slashdot Mirror
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."
But wondering if custom compile might be the only option for those wanting to use older hardware or just trying to optimize for any hardware.
Is Gentoo a viable option these days?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Never heard of it. But no arguments from me for dropping 32 bit support. I kind of wished microsoft did that starting with windows 8 or earlier.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
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.
People with older 32-bit machines will use older distros and ones specialized for use on low-RAM and slower CPU performance. Lubuntu really wasn't ever "that guy" anyway. Distros like Slackware ain't gonna go 64-bit only I'd guess and neither would tinkerer distros like Gentoo. Of course, if you really want to have fun on 32bit machines, I'd endorse running NetBSD :-)
Biggest problem is not "ok we're dropping support after version X". It's when they do that and then nuke all the old archives, making it impossible for people with older hardware to still look up and install the "final" versions. Like when LineageOS went forward to their version 15, dropped 90% of their supported devices AND proceeded to nuke the archives from orbit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
This is where Bittorent comes into play. Most major Linux distros have Torrents available for them, and they're listed on DistroWatch. I personally maintain ~1TiB of Linux and BSD ISOs from various distros hosted on a dedicated server with 1gbps uncapped upload. So even if the official web sites remove their download links and mirrors, the torrent archives will live on.
I'm writing from Gentoo, and you can certainly use an x86 profile, but compiling modern packages on old hardware isn't really a viable option. If you don't have 4 GB or RAM compiling firefox or libreoffice is straight out of the question. And yes updates can often be tricky, things rarely get outright broken, but finding your way around a block often involves telling portage to update a whole slew of related programs at once. (Qt, Tex, GHC, and mesa are regularly issues for me)
Running a minimal system with a lightweight desktop might be viable on old hardware, but I don't reccomend it. There's are distros focused on legacy and they may be better options, but honestly you can pick up a refurbished core duo system with 4GB or RAM for a hundred bucks or less, and most distros will run just fine on that.
If you can get it to compile.
I have tried it a decade ago on my Ultra Sparc. I kept on running into problems with a custom compile, as there seems to be a lot of assumptions in the make file that may not be the case for your platform, and the makers failed to make it as a detectable item.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Then the 386, 486, and Pentium showed up and it became 32 bits. Yes, I am getting old.
Corporatism != Free Market
Popular with the two developers and the five users.
Even 8 year old hardware is mostly 64bit aside from some netbooks.
And even many netbooks from 2010 or so, using Atom N450 CPU, can run x86-64 software. But the fact that they max out at 2 GB of RAM can pose a problem especially if you need libc6-i386 installed for Wine or for one or more legacy applications. One thing keeping netbook users from throwing out their old netbooks and replacing them with new laptops is that new 10.1" laptops have since become hard to find.
I'm not a really big advocate of Linux. I would LOVE to be an advocate, but let's face it, it hasn't exactly taken the consumer level market by storm, so I'm pretty much stuck with Windows for work and home.
As such, I'm not familiar with Lubuntu. This is the first time I've heard about it. How many users can they possibly have? How do these extremely small distribution companies stay financially sustainable?
A friend of mine recently showed me her old Toshiba netbook. She knew it was practically unusable as it was installed with XP. It has a 32 bit Atom processor.
So, after "I'm not promising anything but let me take a look", it is now running XFCE on Mint and working beautifully again. The original battery was just about dead but it was a very simple matter to purchase a new one through eBay. We could even upgrade the memory, if she chooses to do so.
Seems to me to be such a shame to condemn perfectly good working hardware just because the OS is no longer available in 32 bit, as I sure will eventually happen. We are, after all, a shamefully wasteful species.
I use Protel 99SE, that I bought in 1999, most weeks. Some fiddlin' for it to be happy under Win8.1, due to a single deprecated call.
I know a few people who use older engineer software because it works, and they know how to use it fast. Something MS didn't appreciate in the toolbar redesign Office 2003 -> 2007.
I expect it is a problem with support. If you allow and old distribution to be downloaded from your site, you are responsible for some level of support (even if you say it is unsupported) Say Version 2 had a security flaw, you are still allowing people to download it, should you fix that flaw? Because there is still thousands of people downloading it and using it.
Sometime it is easier when it is out of support, to cut it out of your official channel all together, because your responsibility for it has ended.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Microsoft doesn't support XP anymore. So Microsoft isn't getting money from china if they choose to put themselves in risk.
I remember even further back when Linux was recommended for new state of the art hardware. It was a Free 32bit OS, perfect for your brand new 386 and 486 computers, while the other rubes were running 16bit OS's like DOS with Windows 3.1, you had Linux that was native 32bit, and supported protected memory and real multi-tasking. If someone back in the mid 1990's wanted Linux they had to upgrade their system to a beefy system.
There really is a limit to what you can do with old systems, and expect to install a modern OS on them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I jumped ship to Funtoo on my latest Plex server. Funtoo's a little slower to get packages into Portage (example, Gentoo has dev-lang/mono-5.16.0.220, Funtoo is still only on dev-lang/mono-5.4.1.6), but not majorly detrimentally and (this is idle speculation) I assume that that is part of the reason my system hasn't broken nearly as often as it did under Gentoo (the other part is seemingly obvious, this is a much more specialized install than my last Gentoo install). If I need something more recent, I can plug the Gentoo overlay into portage, mask everything in it except the package I need, and rock until it's updated on Funtoo or just let the one Gentoo portage package stay (that's what I'm doing with Mono to keep Ombi/Sonarr/Radarr running properly).
More to the point of the original question, my buddy who sold me this server was using it for the same application, under Windows. I get almost thrice the bandwidth he did out of it.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
That is a shame.
I use Lubuntu on VMs on my desktop. 64 bit VMs take a bit more memory. So I prefer a 32 bit OS in a VM running on a laptop.
It's your problem when your tax money has to clean up the e-waste that users discard as they purchase newer hardware.
Are you familiar with the term "Fashion victim"? You are obviously what I would call a "Techno victim"! Whilst the computer I am using right now is a Toshiba NB520, 64 bits Atom but otherwise extremely similar to the 32 bit computer my friend owns, both machines are far quicker than the rate at which I can type. When you get your 128 bit tablet what are you going to do with it? Use it or just brag about it?
You think it's wrong to be more than 20 years old? If you were not an Anonymous Coward we would know who to scrap when you reach that age.
Good branch and I'd give arth1 an "Informative" mod if I ever had a mod point to give. My version of the question would focus on a more minimal Linux, but it's probably easier for me to just stand pat in my situation.
My situation is that I have an ancient machine that I use several times a week for one task (that requires FCB support). It's running an ancient and no longer supported version of Ubuntu (though I'm running 18.10 and 18.04 on other machines). However it has no network connection, so I think it's safe enough and since I have no idea when it will get sick or die, there's no reason for me to invest energy or time in it.
However the bigger question is "How do they know Lubuntu deserves to die?" I think the real problem is the bad economic model of Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular.
So let me reword the question: "Why not maintain Lubuntu as long as a sufficient number of users want to pay for the costs?" If the economic model offered such an option, then Lubuntu would basically be competing for its survival against other low-demand distros, and as the number of actual users declined, the demand would drop and the remaining users would gradually (and smoothly) be concentrated into surviving distros that address their special needs.
From my twisted perspective, the solution approach seems intuitively obvious to the most casual observer, but (judging by the usual reaction on Slashdot) I bet you have no idea what I'm talking about. That's enough time for now, but I'll close with the usual ADSAuPR, atAJG.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
fortunately, there are still plenty of distros out there that will cater to older 32 bit machines and lubuntu will still be supported until 2021 so it is not the end of the world - yet :-)
Low-power (energy and performance wise) is pretty much ARM these days, not x86. As far as I understand, this is about dropping 32 bit x86, not other architectures. For really old hardware, you can still update problematic stuff from sources and stay with the last 32 bit release otherwise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This is where Bittorent comes into play.
Relying on the hope that someone somewhere may have an interest in keeping some random specific version of software alive?
No thanks. I prefer a more dedicated form of archive.
you are responsible for some level of support
Now where do you get that silly idea? Just because something is available doesn't mean it's automatically current or supported. In fact there is zero requirements for any software developer to support anything that put anywhere for free, and you'll find the license reflects that fact.
Support is a soft promise, it's not a warranty enshrined into some law.
Considering that Linux is traditionally community driven, and there is a community of archivists keeping the torrents around, and that torrents are a perfectly acceptable way of storing and moving large chunks of information, I think this is pretty much working as intended.
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.
Considering that Linux is traditionally community driven
Yes, but you're relying on a community to keep alive the very thing the community is deciding is no longer important. Communities are great for bigger projects and important projects. They won't help you much with edge cases and niche products.
Upload it to archive.org, so it will stay there forever hopefully, and link it to a website.
on hardware that their users aren't likely to have. If you want software that tightly written you can have it on an old Amiga or a Mac from mid 1992 or so. There's a vibrant community writing software for the old things. But you'll give up stuff like video playback and complex interfaces inside webpages. Maybe you want that, but most folks don't. And if you do, well, it's out there, just don't expect all of us to follow you.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
NetBSD was more like a hobby for guys playing with obsolete gear one step away from the landfill.
It's what makes NetBSD so lovable. Why does everything have to have some market motive or ride the bleeding edge of academic research? Sometimes you and your friends want to build a mini-bike out of an old weed-wacker engine you found in the dump.
And as the few developers drifted away to other projects, what was left resembled someone's garage museum of abandoned computers.
Sound like taking a trip to DigiBarn. I highly recommend checking it out if you have spare hours in your life that you aren't using for anything. Several miles away are some old obsolete trains you can ride. You can make a day with your family of seeing obsolete useless junk.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire