Quoting: F.UltraHere 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]

Neither of those were announcements, they were proposals/discussions.

The 2016 thread proposed sunsetting support of 32bit ubuntu installs ("host/base OS architecture") in 2021, and sunsetting legacy i386 applications (chrome was specifically mentioned; these are the main software applications that are for use on 32bit installs that are not used on 64bit installs) in 2023.

In essence this would mean April 2021 as the sunset for i386 as the
host/base OS architecture. And April 2023 to run legacy i386
applications with security support.

From the 2018 proposal (which, in addition to the aforementioned host architecture and included 32bit apps, also looks to sunset *all* i386 software libraries), it listed 2 main blockers (Steam and Wine), the latter of which they had no idea what they were going to do about, and never actually came up with a plan for before deciding to go forward with dropping the i386 libraries. For steam, they basically just assumed everyone would be fine using a Snap:

On the list of known blockers for removing the i386 port are Steam and
Wine. Solus' snapped Steam is progressing nicely and Steam deb is difficult
to maintain as is [See removal bug]. That leaves coming up with a good way
forward for Wine.

There was no formal announcement of exactly what changes would be made until recently, and even then it was confusing, since the wording didn't distinguish between hardware support, application support, and system library/driver support.

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Quoting: bird_or_cage

vorlon
June 23

I’m sorry that we’ve given anyone the impression that we are “dropping support for i386 applications”. That’s simply not the case. What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions. But there is every intention to ensure that there is a clear story for how i386 applications (including games) can be run on versions of Ubuntu later than 19.10.

For anyone looking for context:

You can find the original post by "vorlon" here [External Link].

"vorlon" appears to be Steve Langasek's account on discourse.ubuntu.com

Steve Langasek is one of the correspondents [External Link] on the mail thread [External Link] for proposing to drop i386.

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Quoting: doomiebabywhat one 'humbug' in the discussion at phoronix shared [External Link]

fascinating...

Indeed. If they decided not to go with anything Debian-based, that would be very interesting. Wonder what distro "tooling" currently sparks their fancy...

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Had never played this game before. Took a couple hours to get a good feel for the controls. Definitely a mild learning curve (there's a reason Ani is the only human who can pod-race :p ), especially if you've never controlled a hovercraft. The hovercraft physics are interesting, especially having to balance between thrusting forward and having enough downward thrust to keep from crashing into the ground.

The tutorial could use some polish. I'd prefer if the game paused completely when showing the required tutorial steps instead of slowing down, since it's already challenging to control a vehicle where the trajectory doesn't immediately change when you turn it (and the slow-mo makes it hard to tell if you're turning too much). It also didn't register the fuel drop the first couple times and I had to restart that tutorial multiple times before it finally took (it finally worked when I dropped it at the repair station...no idea why).

It's also not immediately intuitive that holding the downward thrusts long enough turns the vehicle around. I had no idea why the vehicle was turning around when I was trying to hover to slow my decent in the tutorial (the slow-mo didn't help with that part either). It also wasn't clear that you didn't have to hold the downward thrusts the entire time you were descending, just toward the end.

Overall: it's fun once you get the hang of the controls. Haven't tried multiplayer yet. I was able to get first place on a couple maps in both Easy and Medium difficulties. Haven't played hard enough to place. The devs have earned a purchase from me.

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FYI: The dev has responded in the original discussion:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/864060/discussions/0/3374780959384939551/?ctp=2#c1644290549108798344 [External Link]

As a frequent player of that game for the past few months, I can say it runs quite well on all the Linux computers I've tested. As with pretty much any game, I'd be perfectly fine with *official* support from the developer, even if it's through Steam Play.

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