11 votes

Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS

2 comments

  1. Crestwave
    (edited )
    Link
    Well, most users of Steam and Wine probably don't frequent the developer mailing lists, so the discussion turned to the dropping of i386 images. I feel like it would've gotten more attention if...

    After the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release we had extensive threads on the ubuntu-devel list and also consulted Valve in detail on the topic. None of those discussions raised the passions we’ve seen here, so we felt we had sufficient consensus for the move in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. We do think it’s reasonable to expect the community to participate and to find the right balance between enabling the next wave of capabilities and maintaining the long tail. Nevertheless, in this case it’s relatively easy for us to change plan and enable natively in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS the applications for which there is a specific need.

    Well, most users of Steam and Wine probably don't frequent the developer mailing lists, so the discussion turned to the dropping of i386 images. I feel like it would've gotten more attention if they made a separate discussion for it.

    Also, their proposed solution for Steam there is using Snaps, which seems much more reasonable than their FAQ entry, which advised running it in an LXD container with GPU passthrough. Wine, however, is listed as an unsolved blocker and I don't think the problem has been resolved, as evidenced by https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/results-of-testing-games-on-64-bit-only-eoan-19-10/11353.

    Although it has been resolved now, this fiasco shows how... disconnected and out of touch Canonical feels. I'm not a user of Steam nor Wine but I can still tell how important they are for some people and other distributions clearly see that. Users often assume people who dislike Ubuntu are simply elitist, but this is why the only Ubuntu derivative I would consider is Pop!_OS.

    3 votes
  2. moocow1452
    Link
    So the plan is to ask people which dependancies they need, make a whitelist of the most popular ones, and depend on the developers to make Snap Packages for everything else. I see nothing that can...

    So the plan is to ask people which dependancies they need, make a whitelist of the most popular ones, and depend on the developers to make Snap Packages for everything else. I see nothing that can go wrong here...

    1 vote