Quoting: Guest

Quoting: F.UltraSo Ubuntu seeing more money in IoT and AI and thus want to put some focus into those areas are now them neglecting our preferences? Seriously, what is it with this whole distro-wars thing where people who use/like another distro just have to throw all kinds of shit at everyone else?

Could it be so simple as they actually thought that no one used 32-bit applications anymore since they saw the downloads of thsoe packages dropping off since 2015? No of course it has to be some grand evil plan where they want to remove everything that isn't IoT or AI...

You have many assumptions but they are mostly incorrect. I respect Ubuntu and I didn't throw all kinds of shit at everyone else. I started on Ubuntu 10.10 and I saw the many questionable decisions that they made since 2010.

It's also undeniable that they are focusing more on IoT recently. We live in a world where people want more. 5G, and the Internet of Things (IoT) that goes with it, promises to give us more.

5G and IoT promises to connect us in our homes, schools, workplaces, cities, parks and open spaces to over a trillion objects around the world. It promises cars that drive themselves, washing machines that order their own washing powder and softener plus of course super fast downloads and streaming.

And because I want to help humanity and Ubuntu users I will give you some additional IoT sector facts.

The USA is currently leading the way on 5G. At the June 2016 press conference where the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) head Tom Wheeler announced the opening up of low, mid and high spectrum’s. There was no mention of health effects whatsoever. But the dangers are real.

Thousands of studies link low-level wireless radio frequency radiation exposures to a long list of adverse biological effects, including:

DNA single and double strand breaks
oxidative damage
disruption of cell metabolism
increased blood brain barrier permeability
melatonin reduction
disruption to brain glucose metabolism
generation of stress proteins
a denser soup of electrosmog
effects on the skin
effects on the eyes
effects on the heart
immune system effects
effects on bacteria resistance
effects on plant health
effects on the atmosphere and depletion of fossil fuels
disruption of the natural ecosystem

That is just a long list of unsubstantiated pseudoscience that have no basis in reality. And if you do find some real studies in that long list of yours I can guarantee right now that they are studying energies that are extremely more powerful than was is used in wireless communications.

We've had cellphones and wireless networks for 36 years and still there is not a single case of increasing cancer rates or other deceases that the cranks are connecting to radio frequencies.

Fun fact is that the number of "EM-sensitive" people have decreased by a large margin since Facebook and Instagram became popular. Strange isn't it. Another fun fact is that to date there has not been a single "EM-sensitive" person that have been able to determine if they have been exposed or not to EM-radiation when the tests are blinded, imagine why...

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Quoting: zen_xeno

Quoting: F.UltraI think that what you have seen from the outside is Canonical going from having endless funds (from Shuttleworths selling of Twathe) to having those funds being dried up and having to earn actual income in order to stay alive.

I still believe that they have an interest in being a good linux distro, their users and the desktop. Just that they also try to cut everything unnecessary in order to keep the cost down as much as possible and this time they made the wrong decision that they thought that no one was using 32-bit software.

I myself stopped building 32-bit versions of our software back in 2016 when that first announcement came on ubuntu-dev and have not received a single request for it since then so I do think that it's an easy assumption to do unless you are deep into games and Wine.

About the "postponed" bit we don't really know about that either, earlier they where to abandon it altogether so in time they might come to the conclusion that they cannot postpone it either.

Indeed, it is not Shuttleworth's responsibility to indefinitely support what has enough popularity to be an entirely community maintained and funded operation, that's how he see's it, how you see it, how I see it, certainly.

IMO Valve should be the one funding the 32-bit support effort, they have the most at stake there, they have vast wealth to draw from and the motivation to gather the required resources. There perhaps ought to be a choice upon installation of Ubuntu whether to include legacy gaming support - Valve's official container (flatpak, Snap) or their official PPA, therein residing not only Steam but also all the maintained legacy 32-bit libraries at the heart of this whole imbroglio.

Valve has expended quite a huge effort toward improving gaming on linux. The client, the Steam machine efforts, Vulkan contributions, consultation and conferences with devs, and now proton. It is a huge effort, they must have easily spent millions on this. They prove their recent continued investment with proton - they have made the biggest investments of time and resources, I await their next move. IMO they should support Canonical and form an agreement to handle the 32-bit stuff going forward.

I do think however that it's in Ubuntu:s best interest to keep the 32-bit libs, if they loose too many users due to this then they risk becoming irrelevant which will impact them in the areas where they do make a living.

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Quoting: tmtvlC#, huh. A shame, I'd have loved to contribute some code, but if it's C# I can't. Still looking forward to what comes out.

Still popular on Windows and this seams to be a project by a Windows dev.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: Prime_EvilGiven that part of the reason for dropping support for 32-bit libraries is the effort required to perform QA, would it be worth running a fundraiser so those who care about continued multiarch support can contribute towards a solution? Would Canonical be open to such a solution - it seems a better use of the community's time and effort than the angst out there at the moment...

When will you see the general picture? Ubuntu is reducing it's investments in the non-AI and non-IoT space since 2015 (or maybe much earlier). And it's very easy to find the reasons:

Canonical plans to raise its first outside funding as it looks to a future IPO [External Link] "Throughout the years, Shuttleworth self-funded the project and never showed much interest in taking outside money. Now, however, that’s changing."

Mark Shuttleworth sees increased demand for enterprise Ubuntu Linux desktop [External Link] "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers. We're starting actually now to commercially support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before," he said.

Canonical updates Ubuntu Core OS for IoT devices [External Link] "Canonical’s announcement is important because although the battle for desktop and smartphone OS dominance has already been decided, it’s still pretty much wide open in the case of IoT, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc."

Why are you trying to keep Ubuntu alive for your own use case when their CEO and their team want to neglect your preferences and instead focus on IoT and AI?

So Ubuntu seeing more money in IoT and AI and thus want to put some focus into those areas are now them neglecting our preferences? Seriously, what is it with this whole distro-wars thing where people who use/like another distro just have to throw all kinds of shit at everyone else?

Could it be so simple as they actually thought that no one used 32-bit applications anymore since they saw the downloads of thsoe packages dropping off since 2015? No of course it has to be some grand evil plan where they want to remove everything that isn't IoT or AI...

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: 14I don't think Ubuntu has to maintain a legacy-compatible public image. They can move on.

Yeah, they will move on to oblivion. Without applications, and that include games, they are nothing. Imagine that, its "differential" from other distros being that it doesn't run whole categories of drivers, vsds, applications, games, utilities and libraries.

We have lot of choices, fortunately. In a way, I am kind of glad they tried that while still small. If they were the size of Apple, or worse yet, the size of Microsoft, they would be attempting things much, much worse, because they would think they have the leverage.

Do I seem bitter, or Ubuntu-hater? Well, maybe I am becoming one after using it for more than a decade and sometimes cheerfully defending Canonical. I am becoming one not because of others, but because of Canonical itself. I could see at the time of the accusation of "spyware" that it was a lie against them, I could understand at the time of Unity the way they kind of forced people to use it and agreed with that, I could accept they were trying to innovate with Mir (despite the lies some of their devs said about Wayland) and I really liked Upstart, I understood when they created snaps and even started studying snapcraft, I filed a lot of bugs at launchpad, I subscribed to their mailing lists, I even used Ubuntu Phone on my Nexus 4 for more than a year, but I realized now that they have really no interest in the desktop, no interest in their users and no interest in being a "good" linux distro, they just have starry eyes turned to the corporate world where they think that without mindshare they would take the place of Redhat. And by foregoing the desktop and gaming world by abandoning 32 bits (remember: they JUST POSTPONED IT!), they are losing all that remains of mindshare.

Let's all move on, then. Let's move on from Ubuntu to another distro. I am eagerly waiting for the Steam announcement for a supported distro. I have all my installations in LVM anyway, it's just a matter of replacing / and /usr logical volumes, and I can dual-boot for a while. I hope it's Pop!OS but I would stick with Solus, or Arch, or Fedora.

I think that what you have seen from the outside is Canonical going from having endless funds (from Shuttleworths selling of Twathe) to having those funds being dried up and having to earn actual income in order to stay alive.

I still believe that they have an interest in being a good linux distro, their users and the desktop. Just that they also try to cut everything unnecessary in order to keep the cost down as much as possible and this time they made the wrong decision that they thought that no one was using 32-bit software.

I myself stopped building 32-bit versions of our software back in 2016 when that first announcement came on ubuntu-dev and have not received a single request for it since then so I do think that it's an easy assumption to do unless you are deep into games and Wine.

About the "postponed" bit we don't really know about that either, earlier they where to abandon it altogether so in time they might come to the conclusion that they cannot postpone it either.

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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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