I do worry that in much of the world Linux is gaining traction but not in the country of our future overlords.

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True. But this is the actual OS we're talking about here--it hasn't been a mostly-hobbyists project for a long time. People get paid to work on Linux.

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I'm quite suspicious of the new Nexus ownership. But this doesn't appear to be their fault. I'm sure something that is their fault will appear at some point.

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The issue here is not how the 32-bit software is distributed. Sandboxing it or not is irrelevant. The question is, who's going to maintain it? I don't see where Flatpak or any other such approach gives an answer to that question. Flatpaks have to get the libraries somewhere, why are so many people ignoring this?

The bottom line is, there are a lot of people using 32-bit software. Either the 32-bit versions of what that software needs in order to run have to be maintained, or some emulation thing needs to exist that creates the same result with less maintenance overhead. Putting stuff in a Flatpak neither maintains any libraries nor represents emulation. It is not relevant.

The alternative is to just not do it and pretend this is a defensible position. I don't think "but having my OS actually run software is hard and users who insist on it are being unrealistic" is a defensible technical position.

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@Stella Small open source projects tend to be very tricky to work with and be difficult to use, build and whatnot. This is going to be true in any OS, but they are much less common in Windows . . . small open source projects are usually Linux based. It has little to do with whether Linux is "viable as an application platform".

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This topic probably needed to be broached in one way or another. But this guy seems either foolish or insincere to me. He "wasn't expecting" the reaction he got, and it's just sooo unfortunate that people were mean to him? If he genuinely wasn't expecting it, he's an idiot, because it is completely obvious what the reaction was going to be, right down to it being exactly the same reaction Ubuntu got for exactly the same reasons a while ago. So OK, if that's the case then hopefully now he's learned something.

But if he really wanted reasoned responses that didn't take sides, he had an option. Rather than saying "I propose that we wholesale rip out this stuff a lot of people depend on", which is what he said, he could have said "Maintaining this stuff a lot of people depend on is difficult the way we do it, is there some way we could arrange for users to still be able to do what they want to do, but with less overall maintenance effort?"

But he didn't do that, so he got the response he asked for. His snidely bitching about it now seems disingenuous to me.

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This feels like that moment in the sandbox where you've finished building whatever the heck and you stomp through and destroy it.

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The first thing I thought was "Can you do Godzilla?" and I am pleased to see in the trailer that yes, you can!

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Not for me, I try to stay off painkillers for the most part. A bit of Tylenol now and then, that's about it.

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..and now I find out that the OS I chose might just end overnight right after I just jumped ship from Windows?

I wouldn't actually worry too much. I don't think even the person who made the change proposal has in mind to actually just dump 32-bit support. There's a reason they seem to have made the proposal with extra timeline. I think what they really want is to get the discussion going along the lines of "in order to reduce the maintenance burden of 32-bit stuff without losing too much functionality, what would we need to do?"

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