Quoting: Gryxx

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Gryxx

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraNo I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

When they "announced" this years ago, did they set a date? Was it fully decided and plotted out? How much did they broadcast their intentions so that people could prepare their transition?

Or was their announcement now still just a "plan" to be discussed, despite the fact the changes takes effect in a few months?

Everyone was surprised by this because information was not communicated clearly enough and in advance enough. Yeah, we are probably overstating the impact... but this a panic Canonical created.

Here is the initial announcement from last year: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040310.html [External Link] so it was just one year ago and not years as I first claimed (shame on me there).

edit: further research shows that they also made an announcement back in 2016: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html [External Link]

Basically, they said in 2016: "What do you think is appropriate?"
In 2018 as i understand they talk about dropping i386 images- not whole legacy 32 bit support, at least in your linked post
In 2019 we get: BANG!, you have 4 months to prepare your software/game/library for 64-bit only Ubuntu. You need 32 bit? Stay on older system until it runs out of support.
There was never a plan to migrate software. There was discussion about dropping, but until recently we had no timelines or guides how to prepare. That's not fair.

Here is a quote from the 2016 post:

18.10+:
* Stop providing i386 port
* Run legacy i386 only application in snaps / containers / virtual machines

And that is exactly what they proposed to do in the now famous 19.10 announcement. And while I agree that 4 months is a very small time frame, it's quite obvious that they consider non LTS versions to be mere testbeds and that people would remain on 18.04 for quite some time:

Q. I have 32bit 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS installed, what are my upgrade options?

18.04 LTS has Standard Security support until 2023. Extended Security Maintenance runs for a further 5 years until 2028. You can stick with your current installed version until then and still be safe and secure.

This should give plenty of time to migrate away from 32-bit legacy applications before the next LTS which will be available in April 2020, or the following LTS in 2022. Alternatively place the legacy application inside an 18.04 LTS i386 container, on top of a newer 64-bit installation of Ubuntu.

I think a major problem here is that many people never read that far or just thought that, well let's worry about that in 2018 and then forgot about it. This whole rally that happened now should have happened back in 2016, perhaps then we could have avoided all the name calling.

Or some other variation of above things and/or adjusted timelines.
What do you think is appropriate? Can we survey and/or somehow
validate if above would be appropriate or needs to be extended or can
be shortened?

That's not announcment. That's question. And,, beeng quite rude- Why the fuck i need to stay with old distro, that does not support recent hardware? What can i do if i want to play Steam on my Ryzen 7 3500x an RX 5000?

It was a clear indication that they where thinking in those terms and incidentally that is exactly what they then announced would happen for 19.10, a problem here is that users, Valve and WINE didn't pick this up in 2016 while the Ubuntu devs apparently thought that they did so when no one complained they went ahead with the plans.

Ubuntu have what they call HWE which basically is when they will release a new kernel in order to support the newest hardware on older LTS systems. So your RX5000 will be supported on 18.04LTS.

Anyway we are all beating a very dead horse right now since Ubuntu have decided to continue with 32-bit support for selected packages. So if we continue this too long we will end up just like the People's Front of Judea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4 [External Link]

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraNo I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

When they "announced" this years ago, did they set a date? Was it fully decided and plotted out? How much did they broadcast their intentions so that people could prepare their transition?

Or was their announcement now still just a "plan" to be discussed, despite the fact the changes takes effect in a few months?

Everyone was surprised by this because information was not communicated clearly enough and in advance enough. Yeah, we are probably overstating the impact... but this a panic Canonical created.

Here is the initial announcement from last year: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040310.html [External Link] so it was just one year ago and not years as I first claimed (shame on me there).

edit: further research shows that they also made an announcement back in 2016: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html [External Link]

OK, so those are not official announcements, those are discussions. In their mailing list, so they didn't communicate this to the general public. In the 2018 e-mail, which is a proposal and not a final word, they mostly talk about dropping the image, about hardware support, and that the first step should be dropping the image (which I think everyone agrees). No timeline is given to drop multilib other than "we should eventually do it", no final decision is reached (on that one e-mail at least). On the 2016 e-mail, it is actually discussed dropping the libraries and surprisingly a tentative timeline is given. It is still only a suggestion, with plenty of questions asked, and the timeline was obviously discarded (it should drop compatibility on 18.10).

So no, not communicated clearly and in advance.

That mailinglist is how they communicate changes, and that is also where the recent post for 19.10 was picked up.

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Quoting: Gryxx

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraNo I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

When they "announced" this years ago, did they set a date? Was it fully decided and plotted out? How much did they broadcast their intentions so that people could prepare their transition?

Or was their announcement now still just a "plan" to be discussed, despite the fact the changes takes effect in a few months?

Everyone was surprised by this because information was not communicated clearly enough and in advance enough. Yeah, we are probably overstating the impact... but this a panic Canonical created.

Here is the initial announcement from last year: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040310.html [External Link] so it was just one year ago and not years as I first claimed (shame on me there).

edit: further research shows that they also made an announcement back in 2016: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html [External Link]

Basically, they said in 2016: "What do you think is appropriate?"
In 2018 as i understand they talk about dropping i386 images- not whole legacy 32 bit support, at least in your linked post
In 2019 we get: BANG!, you have 4 months to prepare your software/game/library for 64-bit only Ubuntu. You need 32 bit? Stay on older system until it runs out of support.
There was never a plan to migrate software. There was discussion about dropping, but until recently we had no timelines or guides how to prepare. That's not fair.

Here is a quote from the 2016 post:

18.10+:
* Stop providing i386 port
* Run legacy i386 only application in snaps / containers / virtual machines

And that is exactly what they proposed to do in the now famous 19.10 announcement. And while I agree that 4 months is a very small time frame, it's quite obvious that they consider non LTS versions to be mere testbeds and that people would remain on 18.04 for quite some time:

Q. I have 32bit 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS installed, what are my upgrade options?

18.04 LTS has Standard Security support until 2023. Extended Security Maintenance runs for a further 5 years until 2028. You can stick with your current installed version until then and still be safe and secure.

This should give plenty of time to migrate away from 32-bit legacy applications before the next LTS which will be available in April 2020, or the following LTS in 2022. Alternatively place the legacy application inside an 18.04 LTS i386 container, on top of a newer 64-bit installation of Ubuntu.

I think a major problem here is that many people never read that far or just thought that, well let's worry about that in 2018 and then forgot about it. This whole rally that happened now should have happened back in 2016, perhaps then we could have avoided all the name calling.

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: F.UltraNo I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

When they "announced" this years ago, did they set a date? Was it fully decided and plotted out? How much did they broadcast their intentions so that people could prepare their transition?

Or was their announcement now still just a "plan" to be discussed, despite the fact the changes takes effect in a few months?

Everyone was surprised by this because information was not communicated clearly enough and in advance enough. Yeah, we are probably overstating the impact... but this a panic Canonical created.

Here is the initial announcement from last year: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040310.html [External Link] so it was just one year ago and not years as I first claimed (shame on me there).

edit: further research shows that they also made an announcement back in 2016: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html [External Link]

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Quoting: EikeWell, actually "immature" and "world was ending" were part of your statement, too.

I take it that you don't frequent Phoronix and Slashdot much. If so then don't let the curiosity get the better of you, it's not pretty.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraCurrently Ubuntu have 6391 packages in Main, building that will take hours even for Canonical.

Makes me wonder how Debian is able to do such an enormous feat with its AFAIR ~70K packages...

Quoting: F.UltraWhat is next, UFO conspiracies, 9/11 Truthers, Freemasons, anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO fools?

Will you refrain from such talk in future?

I was mentioning the number of packages in Main, not the total number of packages in Ubuntu since Main is where Canonical provides support. If we count every single package including Updates and Backports then Ubuntu have over 70k packages as well.

Debian receives corporate sponsorships and are a community effort while Canonical as a company have to pay for their own servers, power and personel.

If people drop the conspiracy claims then I'm fully prepared to drop the conspiracy accusations. I have no intention to call people names unnecessary.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraThis is how things are done and decided in the real world all the time, the only difference now is that the immature Linux fanbase for some reason decided to run around in circles screaming that the world was ending.

You mean like Microsoft gave up 32 bit support? And enforced UWP only? Oops...

So tell me when Canonical gave up 32-bit support and enforced UWP only. Oh that it right this very thread exists only because Canonical decided to not give up 32-bit support.

What ever this now have to do with Microsoft?!

We are talking about Ubuntu reverting their decision to not properly supporting 32 bit software anymore. You've said others were doing such stuff all the time. That's where Microsoft comes to mind quite naturally. Giving up 32 bits and enforcing UWP are two examples of stuff they couldn't do due to software that must be supported.

No I didn't say that others did such stuff all the time. What I said was that in the real world companies announce their plans, then they await comments from users and partners to see how said plans will be received after which the plans are either amended or put into production.

The problem here is that the Linux fanbase decided to see the announcement of plans as a foregone conclusion and then run around screaming.

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Quoting: x_wing

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: TobiSGD

Quoting: GuestI can see why they want to remove 32 bit libs because it's a ton of work.

But a ton of work for whom? They still get the majority of their packages directly from Debian, throwing a patch on one or the other package and just compile. If Debian still supports newer versions of 32 bit libraries, how much work is there really to be done for canonical?

They get the base source code of each package from Debian, then they have to build the IA-32 version themselves, and provide support themselves. Considering the amount of packages in the repo it will take quite some time to build the packages for IA-32 and that is time taken from building for other archs and so on. If there where no cost for providing IA-32 builds then they clearly wouldn't have planned to throw them out to begin with.

The only real cost is QA. Building is normally cheap.

Currently Ubuntu have 6391 packages in Main, building that will take hours even for Canonical.

Seriously, do you people really think that Canonical decided to drop IA-32 for some other reason and then have their devs lie that it had to do with resources? What is next, UFO conspiracies, 9/11 Truthers, Freemasons, anti-vaxxers and anti-GMO fools?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: F.UltraThis is how things are done and decided in the real world all the time, the only difference now is that the immature Linux fanbase for some reason decided to run around in circles screaming that the world was ending.

You mean like Microsoft gave up 32 bit support? And enforced UWP only? Oops...

So tell me when Canonical gave up 32-bit support and enforced UWP only. Oh that it right this very thread exists only because Canonical decided to not give up 32-bit support.

What ever this now have to do with Microsoft?!

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Quoting: dannielloGood that Canonical changed their bad decision, but anyway - it means that "Linux desktop" situation is much worse than I thought:(

Sad, very sad situation. It is well known that Canonical is not serious company, but such absurd situation also harmed Valve reputation (at least from Linux enthusiasts perspective).

It is oblivious that Canonical took this decision without consultation with Valve. It means - there is no agreement between Canonical-Valve. No agreement at all!!! Valve set Ubuntu as "recommended distribution" for game developers and Linux users WITHOUT any serious agreement with Canonical to protect their investment!

And you think that there are an agreement between Valve and Apple? Or between Valve and Microsoft?

This whole fiasco is a fiasco of the Linux fanbase, nothing more.

Close to two years ago they announced that they planned to drop 32-bit (IA-32) support and since no one back then voiced any concern they moved forward to the decision they now made for 19.10.

However they didn't silently drop the packages, instead they announced yet again that it would be done. Then they again waited for comments which this time came in droves and after that they changed their mind.

This is how things are done and decided in the real world all the time, the only difference now is that the immature Linux fanbase for some reason decided to run around in circles screaming that the world was ending.

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