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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."
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.........
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.
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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.
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.
Popular with the two developers and the five users.
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.
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.
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.
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.