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Smart move by Valve IMO. Canonical is offloading a lot of work onto them if they continue down this road, and Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to

Smart move by Valve IMO. Canonical is offloading a lot of work onto them if they continue down this road, and Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to use a new distro. I think it'd be a huge mistake for Canonical not to reverse their direction on this. The original decision was defensible when it wasn't obvious how many problems dropping 32 bit support would create, but obviously it's a big issue to a lot of their customers.

zamadatix 7y ago
I can't think of anything common it's an issue for outside of Wine and Steam, both of which have already been snap-ified before. For the corner cases of legacy 32 bit proprietary software which requires 32 bit system libs 18.04 will be supported until 2028. Other distro's have already went this route without the world burning down.
- blihp 7y ago
  True, but Wine and Steam are very common use cases on the desktop. While both applications could probably go the snap route, I'm not sure they'd be up to taking on then entirety of the 32-bit stack support across all platforms which is what they'd effectively have to do (maintaining the 32-bit stack just on some platforms while using the provided versions on others would be more work for them) Canonical has, yet again, made a mistake here if they care about the desktop at all. Sure, 32-bit x86 hardware is pretty much obsolete. All 32-bit software? Not so much. Seems like the reasonable compromise would be to identify the subset of 32-bit packages/libraries needed to support Wine/Steam and continue to maintain those rather than the entire 32-bit version of the distro.
  - davidgerard 7y ago
    64-bit Wine runs 32-bit Windows binaries just fine.
    - reificator 7y ago
      With or without distro provided 32 bit libraries? Serious question, I actually don't know.
      - blihp 7y ago
        With (on Debian at least, wine32 is a recommended package for the wine64 install)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
iamnotacrook 7y ago
Why would Canonical care? They don't get any money from desktop users. Canonical get to scrap 32 bit on their desktop and server offerings. Why would they want to rethink wasting that money just to prolong the time when they abandon it? Where's Steam going to go? How can they be certain that whatever distro they switch to won't eventually abandon 32 bit? (I mean, I guarantee they will.). Will they then go back to Ubuntu? Or a third distro, then a fourth.... Why don't they just fix their problem now and get it over with?
- pmarin 7y ago
  > Why would Canonical care? It become popular in the cloud because it was popular in the desktop.
  - jcastro 7y ago
    That's not true, as much as people want to believe that. Ubuntu and Canonical jumped on AWS quickly and started to generate supported images that people liked that gave them fresh stuff that they couldn't really get with Amazon Linux and RHEL was still stuck in the 90's enterprise pricing model, so Ubuntu was a natural fit there. Sadly, most Ubuntu users are on mac clients, and Canonical isn't going to care about 1 laptop when they need to spend the money to support the millions of instances that one laptop is spawning on AWS, Azure, GCP. The few "linux desktop" people who are left will still have the same desktop, as long as they get their vscode, docker, cloud tools, and a terminal/ssh they won't care much.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      "most Ubuntu users are on mac clients," What? "The few "linux desktop" people who are left" Citation needed.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        The 1% on Steam hardware survey.
oconnor663 7y ago
From Canonical's perspective, how important is gaming? If it's costing them a lot of time and money to support it, and bringing in approximately zero revenue, is it a mistake to drop it?
- wjoe 7y ago
  It's not all about revenue. Ubuntu has generally had the reputation as the most user friendly and easy to use flavour of Linux for years now. Not always justifiably, and they've made some questionable decisions lately, but it's still been the obvious recommendation for new Linux users, and the one people are most likely to have heard of. A pretty large percentage of technically minded desktop PC users (eg, those most likely to install Linux) are going to care somewhat about gaming. If someone asks the question "what distro should I use for gaming on Linux", the answer is usually "any is fine, but Ubuntu's probably the safest option". With this decision, the answer becomes "literally anything but Ubuntu". Ubuntu became popular because of good sentiment and word of mouth. And the same geeks trying out Ubuntu on their laptops are the ones who end up making the decisions on what distro their company should use on their servers/VMs too. I don't know how much general popularity really helps them, maybe it really is irrelevant, and if everyone stopped using it on desktop tomorrow they'd still retain their popularity in server/cloud. But I feel like the only reason they became popular on servers is because they're popular on desktop. There aren't many reasons to use Ubuntu over RHEL or some variant on servers, except that more people will go "oh yeah, I've used Ubuntu before, I know how to use apt".
- overgard 7y ago
  Well, the difference between distros is pretty marginal as an end user. If two of them are roughly equivalent but one offers the massive Steam catalog, that seems like a major selling point. They might not directly make money off of it, but they could lose users over it.
rlpb 7y ago
> ...Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to use a new distro If Valve supports some distro, then it'll be possible to put that in a container and run it on Ubuntu. That part could probably be automated, and users may not even notice the difference.
- overgard 7y ago
  I don’t know enough about the underlying technology to say if that would work well, but given the level of hardware access games need that sounds really dicey. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but it doesn’t really offer anything terribly unique you can’t get elsewhere, whereas Steam definitely does.
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    This is actually very much possible, and will not cause much of a performance degradation (if any). You can easily directly expose the underlying hardware to a container, and it is in fact very much possible to run games from a container. And I say this as someone who ran games on NixOS inside an Ubuntu container as a workaround (because nix is pretty weird when it comes to dynamic linking).

zamadatix 7y ago

I can't think of anything common it's an issue for outside of Wine and Steam, both of which have already been snap-ified before. For the corner cases of legacy 32 bit proprietary software which requires 32 bit system libs 18.04 will be supported until 2028. Other distro's have already went this route without the world burning down.

blihp 7y ago
True, but Wine and Steam are very common use cases on the desktop. While both applications could probably go the snap route, I'm not sure they'd be up to taking on then entirety of the 32-bit stack support across all platforms which is what they'd effectively have to do (maintaining the 32-bit stack just on some platforms while using the provided versions on others would be more work for them) Canonical has, yet again, made a mistake here if they care about the desktop at all. Sure, 32-bit x86 hardware is pretty much obsolete. All 32-bit software? Not so much. Seems like the reasonable compromise would be to identify the subset of 32-bit packages/libraries needed to support Wine/Steam and continue to maintain those rather than the entire 32-bit version of the distro.
- davidgerard 7y ago
  64-bit Wine runs 32-bit Windows binaries just fine.
  - reificator 7y ago
    With or without distro provided 32 bit libraries? Serious question, I actually don't know.
    - blihp 7y ago
      With (on Debian at least, wine32 is a recommended package for the wine64 install)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

iamnotacrook 7y ago

Why would Canonical care? They don't get any money from desktop users. Canonical get to scrap 32 bit on their desktop and server offerings. Why would they want to rethink wasting that money just to prolong the time when they abandon it? Where's Steam going to go? How can they be certain that whatever distro they switch to won't eventually abandon 32 bit? (I mean, I guarantee they will.). Will they then go back to Ubuntu? Or a third distro, then a fourth.... Why don't they just fix their problem now and get it over with?

pmarin 7y ago
> Why would Canonical care? It become popular in the cloud because it was popular in the desktop.
- jcastro 7y ago
  That's not true, as much as people want to believe that. Ubuntu and Canonical jumped on AWS quickly and started to generate supported images that people liked that gave them fresh stuff that they couldn't really get with Amazon Linux and RHEL was still stuck in the 90's enterprise pricing model, so Ubuntu was a natural fit there. Sadly, most Ubuntu users are on mac clients, and Canonical isn't going to care about 1 laptop when they need to spend the money to support the millions of instances that one laptop is spawning on AWS, Azure, GCP. The few "linux desktop" people who are left will still have the same desktop, as long as they get their vscode, docker, cloud tools, and a terminal/ssh they won't care much.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    "most Ubuntu users are on mac clients," What? "The few "linux desktop" people who are left" Citation needed.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      The 1% on Steam hardware survey.

oconnor663 7y ago

From Canonical's perspective, how important is gaming? If it's costing them a lot of time and money to support it, and bringing in approximately zero revenue, is it a mistake to drop it?

wjoe 7y ago
It's not all about revenue. Ubuntu has generally had the reputation as the most user friendly and easy to use flavour of Linux for years now. Not always justifiably, and they've made some questionable decisions lately, but it's still been the obvious recommendation for new Linux users, and the one people are most likely to have heard of. A pretty large percentage of technically minded desktop PC users (eg, those most likely to install Linux) are going to care somewhat about gaming. If someone asks the question "what distro should I use for gaming on Linux", the answer is usually "any is fine, but Ubuntu's probably the safest option". With this decision, the answer becomes "literally anything but Ubuntu". Ubuntu became popular because of good sentiment and word of mouth. And the same geeks trying out Ubuntu on their laptops are the ones who end up making the decisions on what distro their company should use on their servers/VMs too. I don't know how much general popularity really helps them, maybe it really is irrelevant, and if everyone stopped using it on desktop tomorrow they'd still retain their popularity in server/cloud. But I feel like the only reason they became popular on servers is because they're popular on desktop. There aren't many reasons to use Ubuntu over RHEL or some variant on servers, except that more people will go "oh yeah, I've used Ubuntu before, I know how to use apt".
overgard 7y ago
Well, the difference between distros is pretty marginal as an end user. If two of them are roughly equivalent but one offers the massive Steam catalog, that seems like a major selling point. They might not directly make money off of it, but they could lose users over it.

rlpb 7y ago

> ...Valve easily has enough sway to convince people to use a new distro If Valve supports some distro, then it'll be possible to put that in a container and run it on Ubuntu. That part could probably be automated, and users may not even notice the difference.

overgard 7y ago
I don’t know enough about the underlying technology to say if that would work well, but given the level of hardware access games need that sounds really dicey. Ubuntu is a fine distro, but it doesn’t really offer anything terribly unique you can’t get elsewhere, whereas Steam definitely does.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  This is actually very much possible, and will not cause much of a performance degradation (if any). You can easily directly expose the underlying hardware to a container, and it is in fact very much possible to run games from a container. And I say this as someone who ran games on NixOS inside an Ubuntu container as a workaround (because nix is pretty weird when it comes to dynamic linking).