Proposal to drop 32-bit Ubuntu GNOME support after 18.04 LTS

[John Gilmore]

> PS: You should buy a new atom CPU and replace that Pentium III with. It
> costs $60 and pays for itself in your reduced electricity usage in less
> than a year.

I am surprised to see several people express the attitude that old
hardware and software should just be tossed out and replaced.  No,
that's too weak.  That software projects should be actively run to
ENCOURAGE or REQUIRE people to toss out and replace old hardware.  The
theory seems to be that the purchase price of new hardware is cheap,
so what's the problem?  If you're just running the computer as a toy
in your bedroom, as a student with plenty of time on your hands,
there's no problem; tear it up.  But if it's actually doing work as
part of a larger system, or if your main job in life is not to write
software, but perhaps to end the drug war or defend migrant rights or
to solve health care issues or do something else important, there are
a lot more costs than just the hardware purchase price.

An atom CPU will not directly replace a Pentium III.  (And even if it
did, it still wouln't run the arm64 instruction set.)  Instead a much
larger upgrade needs to be done, replacing at least the motherboard.
But the old motherboard has SCA SCSI drive connections; new ones
don't.  So then all the drives need to be upgraded as well, along with
the chassis.  Basically what you are talking about is weeks of system
administration, to convert over from one set of hardware and software,
to a completely different set of hardware and software.  Some of that
software is custom software that would need to be *ported* into the
new OS.  My experience has been that a few weeks is a minimum; after
researching, specifying and buying the new hardware then there's a few
days of doing backups and restoring the backups into the new system;
tuning up the OS installation so it has all the right packages
configured in all the right ways; etc.  Then porting over the
application code.  Then a few weeks of watching the system closely and
fixing whatever breaks (e.g. jobs that only run once a week so their
dependencies didn't get noticed at first).

Now, maybe you enjoy doing weeks of system administration, or paying
someone to do weeks of system administration, but it isn't at the top
of my list of things to do with my computers.  I see them as a tool
for getting other work done -- I have no need to fool around with them
just for the fun of messing around.  Someday I will indeed be forced
to spend/waste those weeks.  Why do you think that it's YOUR role to
force me into it?  If you deliberately break all your new releases, I'm
more likely to just keep running old releases, risking the security
breaches.

> You use an Atom-based netbook with Ubuntu Gnome?!

Yep, it runs a Pixel Qi screen that is fully readable in bright
sunlight.  You can't get those screens any more, the company has gone
out of business, and they don't use the same physical interface that
is used in more modern laptops.  It's running Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.2.
It has 2GB of RAM (the maximum possible) and a terabyte hard drive.

It's OK that you kids want to force me to "upgrade" that laptop.  I
reinstall the OS on it every time I travel across borders anyway,
since I secure-erase the drive before I cross, and reinstall from a
virgin USB thumb drive on the other side.  I back up what matters to
my more stable machines.  I make sure there's nothing on that laptop
that can't get blown away at will.

I came to use Ubuntu GNOME because the maintainers of mainline Ubuntu
forced me to use their slow, crappy, buggy, unwanted Unity interface
in all their new releases.  I got very tired of that, so switched to
Ubuntu GNOME, which was closest to what mainline Ubuntu used to be.  On
that machine I can easily switch again to a different distro, so I
probably will.

I have another Linux-based system that runs all the audio throughout
my house.  It unfortunately depends on a motherboard that has a
particular video-out interface which is used to run touchscreens all
over the house, so I can't upgrade that motherboard to something that
will let me plug in more than 512MB of RAM.  It originally contained a
newer motherboard (with that video-out interface) but all those
motherboards died a few years after manufacture, due to a supply issue
with bad bypass capacitors, so the only remaining working motherboards
are these older ones.  It doesn't run Ubuntu GNOME; it runs Gentoo,
because that's what its manufacturer shipped it with.  It controls
outboard amplifiers, and interfaces with web browsers and a variety of
touchscreens, plus a remote DVD reader/player unit.  Porting its very
complicated proprietary C++ multiprocess control interface to another
OS and a different kind of touchscreen is a project that might get
done some year.  I have the source code and the licensing rights to do
such a port, just don't have spare months to burn doing it.  Meanwhile
I try to keep it limping along.

Are there no other people on the Ubuntu-GNOME mailing list who
actually use their systems as a means to an end, rather than as an end
in themselves?

	John