Canonical drops 32-bit Ubuntu desktop ISO

Canonical has finally decided to drop support for the 32-bit live ISO release of the Ubuntu distribution. With most of the architecture today being 64-bit, it was only a matter of time that Linux distros stopped releasing 32-bit ISOs.

Confirming the development, Canonical engineer Dimitri John Ledkov wrote, “…remove Ubuntu desktop i386 daily-live images from the release manifest for beta and final milestones of 17.10 and therefore, do not ship ubuntu-desktop-i386. iso artifact for 17.10.”

It is worth noting that Canonical will only stop building the 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop Live

ISO. The company will continue to focus on i386, which is becoming more of a purpose-built architecture for embedded devices. Canonical mainly wants to focus its efforts on the Internet of Things (IoT), where x86-32-bit is still very common.

You can continue to install Ubuntu on your 32-bit machines. However, Canonical will no longer release any new live ISO for these machines.

Canonical will continue to release minimal network installation ISOs for a 32-bit hardware. These images will receive updates and security patches until the next announcement.

Alongside Canonical, open source distributions such as Arch Linux have also recently phased out 32-bit support to encourage users to switch to newer hardware.

The 64-bit processors started becoming common since the launch of AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 in 2003. Today, every single mainstream processor available in the market is based on either AMD64 or Intel 64 architecture.