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

[laffer1]

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.

Re:Is Gentoo still a viable option for old hardwar

[arth1]

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.

Re:How many people use Lubuntu?

[Ramze]

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.

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.