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Operating Systems Ubuntu Linux

Lubuntu, a Popular Ubuntu Flavor, To Stop Providing 32-Bit Releases (betanews.com) 111

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
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."
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Lubuntu, a Popular Ubuntu Flavor, To Stop Providing 32-Bit Releases More

Lubuntu, a Popular Ubuntu Flavor, To Stop Providing 32-Bit Releases

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  • I've not looked into it for years, as that way back Gentoo started being less and less supported by the forums there, etc.....just weren't as many people around nor as helpful as used to be...and update just seemed to break everything.

    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?

    • Re:Is Gentoo still a viable option for old hardwar (Score:5, Informative)

      by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @12:05PM (#57842148) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • 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'

    • 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 wit

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aitikin ( 909209 )

      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

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I've heard of it. Originally it was conceived as a lightweight distro for older hardware, but they seem to have repositioned themselves as a more general purpose distro. Xubuntu too marries the Ubuntu base to a less resource-hungry desktop environment (XFCE), but I think most users choose Xubuntu because they prefer a less elaborate desktop experience, not because they're shoehorning a GUI into a limited number of bytes. It's possible this is what most Lubuntu users want too.

      So this probably represents m

    • Ubuntu with LXDE graphics. Nice for hardware that does not have a lot of memory, well, now not so nice if the hardware does not support 64bit.

      Then again, if I need to, I can just use the last working version. Or use Debian and LXDE.

  • The problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 21, 2018 @11:53AM (#57842090)

    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: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      This is why I've switched over to FreeBSD. And as far as that spec class is concerned, that is pretty damn close to a Raspberry Pi Zero, which I actively test and help port software to (though this is ARM 32-bit). FreeBSD so far still perfectly maintains i386 support as well though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        ARM 32-bit won't help you if your use case involves programs that depend on Wine because Win32 and MFC are hard to port to anything other than i686. In my own case, such programs have included these:

        - FCEUX debugger (free software, Win32 i686)
        - FamiTracker (free software, Win32 i686)
        - OpenMPT (free software, Win32 i686 or x86-64)
        - BGB (proprietary, Win32 i686)
        - NO$SNS (proprietary, Win32 i686)

    • Re:The problem (Score:4, Interesting)

      by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@@@foolishgames...com> on Friday December 21, 2018 @12:12PM (#57842180) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        My logic is if it's got less tracking and data mining builtin than a cell phone, it's probably not worth supporting.

        Just because it's "new" doesn't mean the "old" needs to be destroyed. That mentality is how you get blind sighted and left vulnerable to various actors.

        And yes, it's also how the famous "upgrade treadmill" keeps on chugging. I've seen entire projects go from working perfectly to completely useless on older hardware for no more reason than the developer wanted to replace a four line API call to

    • I havn't had a 32 bit PC for over 12 years, and 2 64bit PC I have retired for being out of date.

      Testing on such an old environment is putting your program into an artificial restriction. The coding that I use to do so the application would run fast on a 8088 XT with 512k of ram and processor speed about 1mhz would not scale well to a modern system, where I would take different approaches to optimize for speed.
      Other then just Ram and clock speed as the systems progress the bottle necks change and their rati

    • Just look at any browser, really.

      Before you declare a browser wasteful you first have decide what it is it should be doing. There's a reason that "any browser" has a large memory footprint and that has fundamentally to do with the capabilities expected in a modern browser, and nothing to do with developers being lazy and wasteful on resources.

      Code a browser that meets all the requirement of the latest web standards, effectively becomes a host to realtime applications, communications, provides hardware accelerated video transcoding, while p

    • 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.

  • Not a big deal. No reason for flames & worries (Score:3)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @11:54AM (#57842096)
    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 :-)

  • The problem comes when past archives are deleted (Score:3)

    by Moryath ( 553296 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @11:55AM (#57842102)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      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.

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by darkain ( 749283 )

          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.

          • 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.

    • 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 en

      • 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.

  • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Then the 386, 486, and Pentium showed up and it became 32 bits. Yes, I am getting old.

  • Popular (Score:3)

    by julian67 ( 1022593 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @12:20PM (#57842212)

    Popular with the two developers and the five users.

  • 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?

    • Re:How many people use Lubuntu? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ramze ( 640788 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @01:01PM (#57842404)

      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.

    • I would LOVE to be an advocate, but let's face it, it hasn't exactly taken the consumer level market by storm

      Why is that a reason not to be an advocate? There's technical problems with Linux on desktops, it's worth sticking to that as a reason rather than simple consumer popularity.

      As such, I'm not familiar with Lubuntu. This is the first time I've heard about it.

      Lubuntu is one of the flavours of Ubuntu that uses the LXQT desktop environment. Effectively it's a fully feature OS including all software that is blazingly fast, sits in under 3GB of disk space and is quite comfortable running in 512MB RAM environments. Compared to other "lite" distributions it's incredibly polished and fully featured

      • Why is that a reason not to be an advocate? There's technical problems with Linux on desktops, it's worth sticking to that as a reason rather than simple consumer popularity.

        If consumer popularity had caught on, the "technical problems" would have been solved long ago. Again, I really *wanted* to advocate for Linux, and even still, it's an amazing computer ecosystem, and get's better and better each year. But, it's still lacking in support from several important software providers. So, I'm left using windows. I would feel like a fraud encouraging others to use a system that I don't find adequate to use myself. But that's just me.

        • If consumer popularity had caught on, the "technical problems" would have been solved long ago.

          How so? Consumer popularity doesn't change the fact that Linux is predominantly community driven. There are several specific distributions and projects to solve the technical problems that affect Linux on Desktop and look where they went; publicly shunned. Then there are underlying problems with the development model and ecosystem being primarily geared towards server environments and power users.

          I would feel like a fraud encouraging others to use a system that I don't find adequate to use myself. But that's just me.

          That kind of is the problem. You're thinking about yourself and not the user you're potentially talking to. (I d

  • Thus, perfectly good hardware goes to scrap (Score:3)

    by flightmaker ( 1844046 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @12:32PM (#57842268)

    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.

    • Same, I have an almost 10yo HP MINI311, with an Atom 32 bits, I overclocked it at 2GHz, put 3GB of DDR3 RAM in it, installed Mint 17.3 XFCE, best of all it has an integrated NVIDIA GPU so I installed the NVidia driver, and it decodes H264 1080p movie in hardware, I can plug it via HDMI on my 55" TV and watch movie, pretty nice for a 10yo system. Eveything works, wifi, bluetooth, etc.

      Also, I can use it to develop my devices going into cars, as it has a 13.1" screen, is small, lightweight, and can compile my

    • Seems to me to be such a shame to condemn perfectly good working hardware

      Perfectly good 10 year old portable hardware is becoming an ever increasing minority. Hardware fails, and the 64bit consumer processor was announced 2 decades ago and released 15 years ago. The Atom is a curious CPU released at a time where all other consumer CPUs (Even Apple mad the move before then) had already incorporated 64-bit support.

    • Your friend has had better luck with her hardware than I have. It's rare for a computer to last more than about 5 years without starting to get flaky. My last 32-bit machine died a long time ago!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ramze ( 640788 )

      I sympathize, but there is always a cost/benefit analysis to be done for supporting older hardware and software which will run under the limitations of old hardware. Windows XP SP3 was roughly the final version of XP in 2008, so we're talking about maybe 10 year old netbook that was designed with a 2 to 3 year lifespan to begin with (Atom processors were barely capable of running XP -- I used to manage a few netbooks on an organization's network). I can't even get Google to support Android OS security updat

  • VM (Score:2)

    by jma05 ( 897351 )

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      So here's my $64 question: Would you pay $10 to continue using Lubuntu? Subject to the condition that there were enough other people sharing your boat and also willing to chip in.

      Per my longer comment above, I'm actually suggesting an alternative economic model.

      However, on the VM question, do you know a VM that supports an FCB without a physical disk partition?

  • 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.

  • Moving to ARM (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pi_rules ( 123171 ) on Friday December 21, 2018 @05:33PM (#57843720)

    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.

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