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Ubuntu Operating Systems Programming Linux Technology

Ubuntu Reverses Decision, Says It Will Continue To Support 32-bit Packages (betanews.com) 94

Canonical has issued a statement on Ubuntu's 32-bit future, saying it will continue to build and maintain a 32-bit archive going forward. From a report: Of course, there was some negativity surrounding the decision -- as is common with everything in the world today. In particular, developers of WINE were upset, since their Windows compatibility layer depends on 32-bit, apparently. In a statement, Canonical said: "Thanks to the huge amount of feedback this weekend from gamers, Ubuntu Studio, and the WINE community, we will change our plan and build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS. We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed. Community discussions can sometimes take unexpected turns, and this is one of those. The question of support for 32-bit x86 has been raised and seriously discussed in Ubuntu developer and community forums since 2014. That's how we make decisions."
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Ubuntu Reverses Decision, Says It Will Continue To Support 32-bit Packages

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    now my life is complete!

    • It is joyous news if you use Steam with ubuntu
      https://www.pcmag.com/news/369... [pcmag.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I'm a little apprehensive of the "selected" part of their statement.

  • 16 bit (Score:2, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 )
    I'm still waiting for the 16 bit version.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by caseih ( 160668 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:02PM (#58815670)

    It's not like Ubuntu is maintaining a full 32-bit distro. These are just a relatively few libraries that are called to support 32-bit executables and dlls in Wine.

    There are several reasons why the Wine developers are hesitant to ship their own 32-bit binaries of these libraries, like Steam does. The main reason is that different distros ship their own patched versions, often older than mainline, of these libraries, and most package managers require that multi-arch packages be the exact same version across architectures. This is mainly so that overlapping files can be trivially deduplicated. For example, you might have libpng.x86_64.rpm and libpng.i386.rpm, which both might contain some duplicated files such as files in /usr/share, /etc, or /usr/doc, /usr/include, etc, depending on what package we're talking about. Also since wine is both 64-bit and 32-bit, and since the 64-bit packages usually depend on the system-installed 64-bit libraries, it's nice to have the same version of the 32-bit libraries for consistency in terms of debugging and bug reporting. Also if they were to ship their source with the wine tree, that would be quite a burden to keep them all up to date. But not impossible.

    Since most of these library packages come with very little change from Debian, which is maintaining 32-bit packages until now and for the foreseeable future, the cost to Ubuntu to do this is not terrible given the benefits to Ubuntu of having users who need to run legacy software (windows or Linux native), or gamers.

    Going forward, there are three options for Wine. First, lobby distros to continue support 32-bit multi-arch versions of certain libraries. Red Hat and Fedora will likely do this for years yet. Second, ship their own copies of these libraries in the source code tree, which will build as dependencies of wine. Third, build shims to thunk data between the wine dlls and 64-bit native versions of things like libpng, etc.

    Wine developers aren't too keen on the last one simply because of the tremendous amount of time and work it would take, and since option 1 is cheapest and already just works. However, this was the only viable option for the stalled Hangover wine project that was an attempt to use wine and qemu to run x86 win32 binaries on Arm. So there is some precedent for this, and it may be the only long-term, permanent solution. Perhaps some kind of automated tooling could be developed to make these conversion shims.

    • My understanding is that Crossover is working on the thunking stuff for Crossover on Mac, as Mac goes 64-bit-only soon, or something like that.
      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        You're right. I had forgotten about that fact. Crossover funds quite a bit of wine development. I'm sure normal wine will get these 32 to 64 bit thunks eventually. I'm sure that many would welcome a 64-bit clean version of Wine that could run 32-bit exes still. Might even simply wine a little bit.

  • by tuffy ( 10202 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:04PM (#58815690) Homepage Journal

    Congratulations gamers and users of WINE -- you forced Canonical to continue supporting some 32-bit packages for now. Yes, the Ubuntu-maker will now waste its resources on antiquated technology to please a very vocal minority.

    I'm not sure how to break it to this guy, but supporting users and their software is what a distribution is for. People whose software is still going to work won't consider that work wasted, that's for sure.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You missed the memo, we have moved past developing software for users. It's now developed primarily to turn those users into product. The only time their opinions matter is when it is enough to actually drive them away from your digital coral. The rest of the decisions are purely about decreasing costs or increasing the amount of data they have available to sell or the amount of ads they can get paid for force feeding you.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Lets start, shall we?

    Thanks to the huge amount of feedback this weekend from gamers,

    .. Signling out "special" people... (yes, signal, the virtuious kind)

    Ubuntu Studio,

    Never let an outrage go unoticed, be sure to market something no one's ever heard of and not related

    and the WINE community,

    Alienating more people out.

    we will change our plan and build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS.

    Which had nothing to do with it. You either support it or you don't, this Bullshit answer says nothing about how those packages will be delivered. My guess, snap fap or whatever the hell else they think of. Completley missing the point.

    We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed.

    Funny, you claim that process already exists.

    Community discussions can sometimes take unexpected turns, and this is one of those.

    Like peop

  • by reiscw ( 2427662 ) on Monday June 24, 2019 @02:34PM (#58815928)

    I would prefer to run Ubuntu (and Ubuntu derivatives, like Mint) exclusively. There are four things that I use Crossover (a commercial distribution of Wine) for:

    1) MS Office (2007). I also use LibreOffice, but I'm a graduate student and docx is supported more than odt in many platforms.
    2) EasyMP, the software to connect through LAN to Epson LCD projectors.
    3) An old release of MATLAB that I purchased as a student, which doesn't require Internet activation.
    4) A Windows-based Euchre game since there's not really a Linux option for that (please let me know if I'm wrong on that one)

    In all of these cases, Crossover works flawlessly. I actually bought a lifetime license with Codeweavers because I appreciate how convenient it makes installing Windows applications.
     
    The news that the 32-bit archive was going down was disappointing; I honestly thought I needed to go back to Windows. I think it's fine for them to only have a 64-bit distribution, but they need to keep the 32-bit archive going. This is not just a Wine issue; I have a Microsoft Surface (yes, I know, I'm sorry, but I like the design) and it has a HiDPI screen. The regular version of DOSBox in the repository does not work on the display; I had to install the Daum SVN version, which is 32-bit and requires the installation of some 32-bit libraries from the package archive. I did some research; people have tried to compile a 64-bit version from source but have not gotten very far.

    I think Canonical made the right move here. Breaking Wine is not going to help Linux on the desktop. I appreciate their willingness to listen to the community. They have been criticized for that in the past, and they deserve credit for changing their ways.

    • 3) An old release of MATLAB that I purchased as a student, which doesn't require Internet activation.

      I've been using Matlab on Linux for ~20 years on and off. Why not use the Linux version?

  • Ubuntu said they were going to keep "some" 32 bit packages. Eventually a lot. And not necessarily in an useful fashion. Snaps or flatpacks do not allow you to easily install steam on you system partition and then the data and games on another hard disk for example.

    IA-32 is needed for a lot of stuff. Not only windows software.

    Many printer drivers.

    Commercial software which, not being open-source, are not going to be recompiled like, ever. Among them many video games both Windows and Linux native.

    Whether you l

  • Since Steam announced 2 days ago that Ubuntu from version 19.10 onward will no longer be officially supported by Steam and they will switch their focus to a different distribution.

    https://twitter.com/Plagman2/s... [twitter.com]

  • Already half-expired? Worth the effort of commenting? Not really, but...

    Here's one minor, but concrete, example of what's wrong with Ubuntu and why it should not be regarded as cost-free. This week, for no reason that I could figure out, mysql-common somehow got corrupted during an update. All the time I spent researching and fixing the problem becomes part of my cost for using Ubuntu. (I didn't time it, but the exact time doesn't actually matter, because it happens so often. Perhaps an hour this time, but

  • It's very hard to get rid of 32-bit libraries on Linux, mainly because of legacy closed source Linux (and Windows via WINE) 32-bit binaries. However, anything new, whether closed source or not, should be released as 64-bit binaries only - this includes entire Linux distros, ideally with the latest Windows OS/apps/games also going 64-bit only.

    By default, 64-bit distros should not install 32-bit binaries/libraries at all - only if packages that absolutely require 32-bit libraries/binaries (e.g. Steam, WINE) a

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