This fall, Fedora 31 and Ubuntu 19.10 are two major distributions of varying degrees the support for the 32-bit platform will fall.
Ubuntu 32-bit dropped?
Canonical had announced in June to drop the 32-bit platform completely, after no more installation media of the 32-bit architecture have been delivered since Ubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark”. Canonical then seized on a storm of indignation, as both the Windows API replica Wine and the online gaming platform Steam rely on 32-bit libraries.
U-turn
The company then rowed back and said that Wine and Steam users and other affected projects with Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS can at least access the required 32-bit libraries. Now Steve Langasek specifies the planned procedure.
Partially supported
The developers have put together a list of packages that users need based on the feedback they have received up to that point. This list contains 52 binary packages that only exist for 32-bit and will now be guaranteed to be available up to and including Ubuntu 20.04. Added to this are the required libraries and dependencies. Overall, this results in 199 source code packages.
The list was curated by first compiling the list of all binary packages that exist only on i386 and not on amd64 in Ubuntu. Then this list was filtered to exclude packets that duplicate functions that are available under a different package name on amd64 systems or that are specific to hardware that is not 64-bit capable.
Report missing packages now
Langasek asks users to name missing packages that are still needed in 32-bit. All other packages will no longer be available for this platform with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” on October 17.
