Proposal: Let's drop i386

[Thomas Ward]

All:

I hate to interject this late in the thread, but I think we need to
clarify what the discussion actually entails.

On the #ubuntu-release IRC channel, it became clear that the purpose of
this thread was not entirely clear, so we need to clarify specifically:

Are we discussing dropping support for i386 *installation images*, or
are we talking about dropping i386 altogether, including in the
repositories in general?

I don't particularly have a care one way or another for the installation
images, as all my infrastructure is either amd64 powered or ARM powered.

However, killing i386 support globally could introduce issues, including
but not limited to certain upstream softwares having to go away
entirely, due to the interdependency or issues with how certain apps
work (read; Wine, 32-bit support, 64-bit support being flaky, and
Windows apps being general pains in that they work on 32bit but not
always on 64-bit).

So with the scope of this email chain, I would like to request a
clarification before we go forward much more with this email chain: Are
we discussing dropping 32-bit for *installer images* this cycle, or are
we talking about the complete global death of i386 as a supported
architecture?

(I can see both sides of the argument, but it's important to
differentiate for the purposes of this chain)


Thomas



On 05/09/2018 10:34 PM, Simon Quigley wrote:
> Hello, On 05/09/2018 04:29 PM, Walter Lapchynski wrote: <snip />
>>> here are some i386 to amd64 ratios for 18.04: Lubuntu cdimage - 0.87 
>> And there is my concern. That says the vast majority of Lubuntu's
>> users are using i386. The question becomes whether or not they have
>> to. There has been documentation all over the place to download i386
>> if you don't know which is the right one and so people may still be
>> running on this. So maybe the number is skewed. But if it's not, does
>> this mean Lubuntu becomes irrelevant? 
> You're misreading the statistics. *Less* people use i386, not more. 87
> i386 users per 100 amd64 users. Additionally, with Lubuntu modernizing
> a bit, I would argue that Lubuntu can and will still stay relevant in
> the future. This is before we dropped LXDE, and it's the LTS. We can
> judge whether or not Lubuntu is still relevant by seeing how the LXQt
> transition plays out. Also, to be fair, Lubuntu 18.04 could be
> considered for sort of a niche audience; people who need to run Linux
> (specifically, with LXDE and Ubuntu) on older machines. Lubuntu's LXQt
> transition does modernize things a bit, while still preserving some of
> those light selling points. I would also not use this as a determining
> factor, because we have no idea how things will look three years from
> now. My best guess is that i386 users will drastically diminish.
>>> The first step would be to all agree on dropping images/installers
>>> but we should keep the end goal of dropping the port in mind ideally
>>> soon as well. 
>> Maybe keeping only the netboot image might make sense? 
> If the port goes away entirely, so will the netboot images.
>
>