Were people upset that they were stopping support for 32-bit hardware? Or that they were stopping support for running 32-bit apps on 64-bit installs?
It looks to me like most people were pissed about the latter, but I'm not clear if Canonical was actually planning to do the latter. It seems like their communication about it was poor, either way.
As long as companies continue to believe that they can bully distros into supporting outdated platforms rather than just dropping them, then those companies will continue to produce software that only runs on those outdated systems.
Ubuntu has now demonstrated that if they try this in future they can be bullied into reversing course.
The software has already been produced. Games are a kind of art and "outdated systems" are needed to play them. Nobody would say that we shouldn't produce the instruments needed to play classical music since there has been plenty of time to do so in the past and when somebody wants to listen to it they should use digital recordings instead.
It sounds like things are on track. In this blog post, canonical is talking about containerising 32-bit support so that the 'ultimate fate' of the 32 bit libs is a situation in which these games can still be played. I'll be totally satisfied if you can run a 32 bit application in some equivalent of DOSbox. It's going to happen eventually, and I think people will accept it so long as a practical alternative is in place.
Windows, Linux, and Mac have supported 64bit software for more than a decade. Mac has been 64bit hardware only for more than a decade iirc, the last version of macOS that could boot on a non-64 bit system must also be more than a decade old at this point.
These companies that were still making 32bit only software 5 years ago were making the choice to both leave performance on the table and cause update problems going forward.
The fact that their were still AAA games coming out 32bit only is insane and the compatibility problem lie squarely on their shoulders.
All this continued walkback accomplishes is cause devs to continue to ship brand new, already outdated software because they know if they make enough noise they’ll get what they want in the future.
Nobody's still producing 32-bit apps. That was never the issue. The problem is that a whole lot of Ubuntu users are still using old 32-bit apps, specifically games. It's not unreasonable for them to want to continue doing that on their home OS.
The list I saw had a large list of recent releases. Given all intel desktop cpus have been 64bit capable for a decade it seems absurd for that to have shipped, especially given many of the games insist on wanting high end gpus.
Thinking like this will cause windows xp to be run into the 2020 or 2030s. Remember the ubuntu motto "humanity toward others"? Aliening 32 bit users won't help anyone.
