i386 EOL plans for Ubuntu Desktop?

[Bryan Quigley]

On Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 3:31 PM, Marcos Alano <marcoshalano at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2016-07-05 12:57 GMT-03:00 Bryan Quigley <bryan.quigley at canonical.com>:
>>
>> The general ideas are:
>> A. Drop ubuntu-desktop i386 ISO for 16.10 and drop some packages from
>> the i386 archive - likely Unity7/8*.
>> B.  Just drop ubuntu-desktop i386 ISO for 16.10.
>> C.  Keep everything as is for 18.04, and then consider dropping i386
>> in 18.10 timeframe.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> I think the option A should be put out of discussion or, at least,
> analyzed very carefully. That's because some applications for i386
> don't have equivalent for amd64. And other applications depend of some
> i386 packages present in the repositories. Big examples are Skype and
> Steam. Steam depends of a series of i386 packages for GUI.

Apologies for not making that clearer.   We are not considering
dropping the entire i386 archive until at *least* after 18.04.  So
Steam and Skype will still work (but really should make amd64
versions!).

The point of A is to prevent people from upgrading to i386 Unity.
With just dropping the ISO building, users could still upgrade to a
now less supported setup via direct packages.  This would block that
and we can come up with other transition options in that case
(autodetect if 64-bit capable and recommend reinstall, etc) - but
that's for a latter discussion I think.