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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."
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.