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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 wa

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.
      - overgard 7y ago
        1% of 90 million monthly users is almost a million users. Supporting something with 900,000 users seems, at the very least, somewhat compelling. Especially since they were already doing it. It's not like they have to actively recruit these people, but what they're definitely doing is telling them to f-off. Also, this isn't just losing Steam: wine apps with 32 bit installers is a major source of software. I know personally I actually do want to use a Linux distro now that Unity 3D support is coming, and Ubuntu would have been my first choice, but I know I'm definitely going elsewhere now :-/
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Unless those million users generate a worthwhile monthly stream of money they are useless versus the remaining 99%.
        overgard 7y ago
        I think that's an over-simplistic way to look at it. Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader If anything loss leaders are more important for platforms, since learning a platform is a big time investment and people will reach for what they know when the time comes to choose something. I can't claim to know if this was the right economic decision for Canonical because it's a very complicated question, but what I can say with certainty is they just gave 900,000+ people a reason not to use their platform, along with sending a strong signal to a lot of observers that might be thinking about investing time in their platform. Is the engineering time they save going to gain them something that makes them attractive to 900,000 new users? That's a lot of people to appeal to.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Canonical already gave up the desktop long time ago, following up Red-Hat footsteps, because those loss leaders were dragging the company down into insolvency.
- pas 7y ago
  It was a nice Debian alternative. Still is, on both server and desktop.
- bb88 7y ago
  Right that was how RH started. And once RH stopped caring about the desktop space, that gave room for Ubuntu to step in. The linux desktop has always been a loss leader to getting inroads into the server space with paying customers.
overgard 7y ago
They may not make money from desktop users, but all their historical actions indicate that the desktop is very important to them. > 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? Well, look at it from this perspective: from a technical perspective this is hard to solve, and the project that they use in order to make this possible (Wine) seems to be lost on fixing this. If Valve doesn't make much money off selling Linux games, they're not going to invest resources to fix this problem Ubuntu has just created. The big loser here is Ubuntu users. And the "fix" involves fixing 32-bit Windows binaries, which from a practical standpoint none of the companies that were only releasing Windows binaries in the first place are ever going to fix this. This isn't about games, this is about software compatibility, and Ubuntu just announced they don't care that much about it. Valve doesn't care as long as SOME distro supports what they're doing, and there's definitely going to be some distro that says, yes, supporting gaming is worth it to us. Also, if you care about Linux on the desktop, companies like Valve are who you WANT on your side. The last thing you want to do is alienate a company like that, and have other companies say: "well, look what happened when Valve tried to support linux" If you're building a platform, which is what Ubuntu is, the last thing you want to say to potential users is: "you can't do what you want here". Games may not make Ubuntu money and they may not be on the radar of a lot of users, but being "the platform that's bad for gaming" and "the platform that can't run Wine apps" is a bad look. Also consider who has the leverage? Valve is offering a massive catalog of games that can't be easily obtained any other way. Ubuntu is is competing with other distros, Windows, and older versions of their own software. And they have virtually zero lock in -- if I want to use a different linux distro it's pretty easy. If I want to get the games that Steam offers in an alternative fashion, on the other hand, in most cases I'm SOL. So Ubuntu has essentially zero leverage here, and worse they're shooting themselves in the foot for no reason, since nobody forced this on them. As the article states, Debian still supports this, so in a sense they're going out of their way to make life more difficult for their users.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Canonical has moved on, the desktop is no longer very important to them. What massive catalog for 1% of desktop consumers?
downrightmike 7y ago
By time the third OS comes into play there will probably be enough shims that Valve's work will be drastically reduced. Valve is playing the long game in everything. That is their operation style. Which seems strange when most every other company is all short term profits.
- bb88 7y ago
  So it seems like if they're playing the long game they would have fixed their 32 bit issues a long time ago. From a software engineering side, relying on 32 bit libraries seems like big pile of tech debt. I've been experience a similar issue trying to get people to migrate off Python 2.7. And managers keep prioritizing features over the "long game". Now if you say they're prioritizing the platforms with the larger customer bases, that makes more sense. And it's not the long game, its just enhancing the profitable side.
  - downrightmike 7y ago
    They did just finish a project that allows most games to be played on linux. Odds are they know what that tech debt looks like and it isn't something that has a reasonable time frame to talk about.
  - gpderetta 7y ago
    The vast majority of those 32 bit windows games are not written by valve. Valve in fact provides native Linux binaries for its own games (but they might still be 32 bits). Nobody is going to recompile thousands of 10 year old windows games just to please a bunch of gamers on Ubuntu.

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.
    - overgard 7y ago
      1% of 90 million monthly users is almost a million users. Supporting something with 900,000 users seems, at the very least, somewhat compelling. Especially since they were already doing it. It's not like they have to actively recruit these people, but what they're definitely doing is telling them to f-off. Also, this isn't just losing Steam: wine apps with 32 bit installers is a major source of software. I know personally I actually do want to use a Linux distro now that Unity 3D support is coming, and Ubuntu would have been my first choice, but I know I'm definitely going elsewhere now :-/
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        Unless those million users generate a worthwhile monthly stream of money they are useless versus the remaining 99%.
        overgard 7y ago
        I think that's an over-simplistic way to look at it. Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader If anything loss leaders are more important for platforms, since learning a platform is a big time investment and people will reach for what they know when the time comes to choose something. I can't claim to know if this was the right economic decision for Canonical because it's a very complicated question, but what I can say with certainty is they just gave 900,000+ people a reason not to use their platform, along with sending a strong signal to a lot of observers that might be thinking about investing time in their platform. Is the engineering time they save going to gain them something that makes them attractive to 900,000 new users? That's a lot of people to appeal to.
        pjmlp 7y ago
        Canonical already gave up the desktop long time ago, following up Red-Hat footsteps, because those loss leaders were dragging the company down into insolvency.
pas 7y ago
It was a nice Debian alternative. Still is, on both server and desktop.
bb88 7y ago
Right that was how RH started. And once RH stopped caring about the desktop space, that gave room for Ubuntu to step in. The linux desktop has always been a loss leader to getting inroads into the server space with paying customers.

overgard 7y ago

They may not make money from desktop users, but all their historical actions indicate that the desktop is very important to them. > 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? Well, look at it from this perspective: from a technical perspective this is hard to solve, and the project that they use in order to make this possible (Wine) seems to be lost on fixing this. If Valve doesn't make much money off selling Linux games, they're not going to invest resources to fix this problem Ubuntu has just created. The big loser here is Ubuntu users. And the "fix" involves fixing 32-bit Windows binaries, which from a practical standpoint none of the companies that were only releasing Windows binaries in the first place are ever going to fix this. This isn't about games, this is about software compatibility, and Ubuntu just announced they don't care that much about it. Valve doesn't care as long as SOME distro supports what they're doing, and there's definitely going to be some distro that says, yes, supporting gaming is worth it to us. Also, if you care about Linux on the desktop, companies like Valve are who you WANT on your side. The last thing you want to do is alienate a company like that, and have other companies say: "well, look what happened when Valve tried to support linux" If you're building a platform, which is what Ubuntu is, the last thing you want to say to potential users is: "you can't do what you want here". Games may not make Ubuntu money and they may not be on the radar of a lot of users, but being "the platform that's bad for gaming" and "the platform that can't run Wine apps" is a bad look. Also consider who has the leverage? Valve is offering a massive catalog of games that can't be easily obtained any other way. Ubuntu is is competing with other distros, Windows, and older versions of their own software. And they have virtually zero lock in -- if I want to use a different linux distro it's pretty easy. If I want to get the games that Steam offers in an alternative fashion, on the other hand, in most cases I'm SOL. So Ubuntu has essentially zero leverage here, and worse they're shooting themselves in the foot for no reason, since nobody forced this on them. As the article states, Debian still supports this, so in a sense they're going out of their way to make life more difficult for their users.

pjmlp 7y ago
Canonical has moved on, the desktop is no longer very important to them. What massive catalog for 1% of desktop consumers?

downrightmike 7y ago

By time the third OS comes into play there will probably be enough shims that Valve's work will be drastically reduced. Valve is playing the long game in everything. That is their operation style. Which seems strange when most every other company is all short term profits.

bb88 7y ago
So it seems like if they're playing the long game they would have fixed their 32 bit issues a long time ago. From a software engineering side, relying on 32 bit libraries seems like big pile of tech debt. I've been experience a similar issue trying to get people to migrate off Python 2.7. And managers keep prioritizing features over the "long game". Now if you say they're prioritizing the platforms with the larger customer bases, that makes more sense. And it's not the long game, its just enhancing the profitable side.
- downrightmike 7y ago
  They did just finish a project that allows most games to be played on linux. Odds are they know what that tech debt looks like and it isn't something that has a reasonable time frame to talk about.
- gpderetta 7y ago
  The vast majority of those 32 bit windows games are not written by valve. Valve in fact provides native Linux binaries for its own games (but they might still be 32 bits). Nobody is going to recompile thousands of 10 year old windows games just to please a bunch of gamers on Ubuntu.