Reasons and recourse
Why would Ubuntu stop supporting 32-bit? Which gentle distros will take in the exiled users? Let’s find out…
In 1991 Linus Torvalds took to the newsgroups to announce a free hobbyist operating system, which would later come to be known as Linux. The humble machine that he used to make this toy OS was a 33MHZ 386 with four megabytes of memory. Indeed, that famous Usenet posting says that Linux was for 386 and 486 AT clones, and that it was categorically not portable to other architectures because of the 386-specific processor features it exploited.
However, by 1995 Linux was running on DEC and Sparc platforms, and others soon followed. In 1997 Linus was awarded his master’s degree for a thesis entitled “Linux: A Portable Operating System”. The architecture-specific bits of the kernel had been largely separated from code that would be common across platforms. Linux had acquired the portability that would be key to its subsequent taking over of the world.
Fast forward to 2012 and the release of kernel 3.8, and we see Linus wishing “good riddance” to the 386 as it is summarily dropped from the kernel. Linux had outgrown its humble beginnings, and that particular 32-bit architecture was no longer being made and was barely being used. Letting the 386 code go made parts of the kernel a little simpler, and meant that the remaining architectures could be treated more uniformly going forward. Occasionally, archaic or barely maintained architectures are dropped from the kernel, and you can get an insight into that process by studying Jonathan Corbet’s write-up at https://lwn.net/ Articles/769468.
We don’t want you to worry that 32-bit x86 code will go the same way. Because it won’t, not anytime soon anyway – hardware from this era doesn’t really require any special treatment in the same sense that the 386 did. The main reason Ubuntu is dropping support for it is purely pragmatic. Since 2004 they’ve maintained two desktop editions, and the vast majority of people (some 98% according to https://ubuntu.com/desktop/ statistics) are using the 64-bit edition. The effort to maintain what is in effect a whole separate distro, and in particular to test the 40,000 packages found in the Ubuntu repositories, is simply not tenable. Plenty of applications now depend on 64-bit instructions (e.g. virtualisation), and plenty need more than the 4GB a processor running on a 32-bit system can address.
Ubuntu isn’t alone in dropping 32-bit support. Fedora let it go officially in version 27, released in November 2017, although a 32-bit netinstall was available up until version 30, released in April 2019. Arch Linux has been 64-bit only since 2018, but a community-driven Arch Linux 32 port is available. Debian will continue to support 32-bit Buster until 2024, and we’ll hear nearer the time whether its successor (codenamed Bullseye) will support the older architecture. Mint 20 won’t have a 32-bit edition, but Mint fans wanting to keep their 32-bit systems minty should check out Linux Mint Debian Edition. As chance would have it, the next two pages cover just that.