There are some reasons to keep software as 32bit, like these: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet

There are some reasons to keep software as 32bit, like these: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2009/06/10/visual-stu... (tl;dr - bigger pointers mean higher memory consumption, they don't want to break third-party plugins, and they're porting to managed anyway). Also, either I'm misunderstanding something, or Ubuntu is throwing the baby out with the washwater here. For example, Arch was always aggressive about not supporting anything but the typical desktop at the time of release, but the 32bit packages are still in a separate repo if anyone needs them.