On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 06:09:02PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > Ubuntu have chosen to support the first use-case, and only the first > > use-case. They longer ship a complete, bootable i386 operating system; > > instead, they have an i386 second-class-citizen architecture that > > is sufficient to provide graphics drivers and other shared libraries > > for legacy 32-bit proprietary binaries. > >... > Ubuntu has a business-minded focus, which is fair enough. > But Debian should not blindly follow whatever Canonical > does with Ubuntu for business reasons.[3] > It does make sense for Debian to differenciate by providing support for > communities whose hardware is not or no longer supported by Ubuntu. It's obviously entirely appropriate for Debian to make its own decision here regarding what they want to support, but FTR the dropping of i386 was largely not a "business" focused decision for Ubuntu. While the ongoing costs of maintaining a full port were a consideration, of equal concern was the fact that we believed we would not be able to provide security support for the architecture as a whole at par with other architectures, due to, among other things, lack of adequate support from the upstream kernel/toolchain community. I'm not sure if i386 has caught up and now has adequate mitigation for Spectre etc, but it definitely wasn't available on an equivalent timeline as amd64. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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