Ubuntu is phasing out i386 (32bit) libraries altogether

[FBnil]

Others are talking about linux games they received that were only shipped in 32-bit forms.

Ah.. just run them from inside LXD containers...

 

[levi]

Or set up your own chroot, although this LXD thing apparently gives you resource constraints over that, so if you're running untrusted software that might be the way to go.

 

[gunrock]

@FBnil actually my C3 a Nehemiah (Via C3-2) so still x86 (32 bit) but falls into i686 cpu category.

 

[Klumpen]

System76 decided to keep 32 bit libraries and maintain them by themselves in their Pop!OS
a distro based on Ubuntu.

 

[AnimatedFreak]

System76 decided to keep 32 bit libraries and maintain them by themselves in their Pop!OS
a distro based on Ubuntu.

Well that's what I'm switching to then.

 

[Klumpen]

It starts:
twitter.com/Plagman2/status/1142262103106973698?s=20

Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD

 

[ClockworkCoder]

Ubuntu just shot themselves in the foot with this.

 

[Klumpen]

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/artic...-dropped-32bit-libraries-will-be-frozen.14423

As an update to the situation around Canonical planning to drop 32bit support, apparently they're not. Instead, the 32bit libraries will be frozen.

Even worse than just dropped. Apt like any other sane package manager doesn't allow version mismatch between x86 and x86_64, so that won't work.

 

[levi]

If the 32-bit libs are available to 64-bit users, they must have a different package name so I don't see a problem there.

But this shows the problem that arise from closed source binary drops. For myself, the vast majority of the games I played on my Pandora had corresponding source, and they kept me entertained personally, so I don't see why people need to go for these closed source games but there you go.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well seems Valve responded to Ubuntu's new position...


https://www.engadget.com/amp/2019/06/22/steam-will-stop-supporting-ubuntu-linux/?guccounter=1

 

[JDTAY]

I kinda quit Steam anyway. Just wondering, what should we use for games? Just GOG, or are there other options?

 

[levi]

For emulators in x86, my go to is mednafen. For everything else, the ports request thread is a pretty good resource for publicly available sources that you should be able to build yourself. For triple AAA games you're pretty much limited to binary drops from Gog and Steam, although some open sourced engines are linked from port requests.

 

[TrashyMG]

I kinda quit Steam anyway. Just wondering, what should we use for games? Just GOG, or are there other options?

If you're ignoring Steam which has likely the best support for anything gaming on Linux on PC, you are left with Some abysmal support from GOG and perhaps Wine / PlayonLinux with varying results.

 

[JDTAY]

Fine, I guess I could try to recover my Steam account when I get a new computer next month. It's just that I lost both the email address associated with it and the device I was using to 2FA into it.

I was kinda tired of the whole pseudo-economy they had going with digital items and the dozen games they were releasing everyday. Have either of those gotten better?

EDIT: Thought my account might have been stolen by now, but the last activity was on September 12th, which would be before I took my break from the internet. I still wonder if I'll have trouble recovering it.

 

[Klumpen]

U-Turn
https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32-bit-i386-packages-for-ubuntu-19-10-and-20-04-lts

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.

 

[elvissteinjr]

We will also work with the WINE, Ubuntu Studio and gaming communities to use container technology to address the ultimate end of life of 32-bit libraries; it should stay possible to run old applications on newer versions of Ubuntu. Snaps and LXD enable us both to have complete 32-bit environments, and bundled libraries, to solve these issues in the long term.

As someone who's purposefully stayed away from snaps and stuff... can I get an explanation how they would solve anything? The libraries inside there still have to be maintained or else you could just run some third-party solution providing the libraries instead.

 

[levi]

Yes, 32-bit libraries will still be maintained, and you could acheive a similar effect by having a lib32 folder and setting your LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running the specific application, but chroots and LXDs (and presumably snaps, but I've not researched those at all yet) provide more security by separating the environment which might become more necessary if ubuntu's 32-bit libs are not going to be fully maintained going forwards for reasons not stated here.

 

[comradekingu]

Ubuntu just shot themselves in the foot with this.

To the benefit of everyone else. Quite good for Ubuntu these days.

 

[FBnil]

https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706

A total of ten architectures are supported: 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit little-endian Motorola/IBM PowerPC (ppc64el), 64-bit IBM S/390 (s390x), for ARM, armel and armhf for older and more recent 32-bit hardware, plus arm64 for the 64-bit AArch64 architecture, and for MIPS, mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian) architectures for 32-bit hardware and mips64el architecture for 64-bit little-endian hardware.