It's heading towards a soap opera. Last Tuesday, Ubunlog echoed from a statement in which Canonical said it would abandon support for the i386 architecture, better known as 32bits. What did that mean? A server, when reading the official note Canonical, understood that what they would do would be do not release more 32-bit Ubuntu versions, which does not mean that future systems will be incompatible with applications developed under that architecture. But after reading more about all this, it is likely that I did not understand what Canonical meant ... or others did not.
Shortly after Canonical's initial announcement, two major software developers raised their voices. First, a steam developer said that it would not support Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine or future versions of X-Buntu. Shortly after, Wine was in charge of ensure that there would be problems with their emulation software, although they were more willing to make an effort. Yesterday a Canonical developer said no, they will not abandon 32bit support, it was all a misunderstanding. But was it?
What did Ubuntu mean by assuring that it would "abandon support for the i386 architecture"?
We do not know if the fears of the developers were founded. What the developers understood, led by Steam and Wine, is that Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine would be the first to be incompatible with 32-bit software. This is a major problem when we talk about Wine, a medium whose most of the code is developed by and for 32-bit software. On the other hand we have Steam, a video game platform whose catalog includes many old titles, which means that we would have to work a lot to make them compatible only with 64bits. But was this the "threat" from Canonical and Ubuntu?
From what we can read in the Ubuntu forum, no, Canonical didn't say this:
I'm sorry to have given anyone the impression that we are "removing support for i386 applications." That is simply not the case. What we are removing are the i386 library updates, which will be frozen at 18.04 LTS versions. But there is an intention to ensure that there is a clear history of how i386 applications (including games) can run on Ubuntu versions after 19.10.
The original note said there was different ways to make 32bit software run on Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine even though it no longer included the i386 architecture in its code. If I was lucky enough to misunderstand it and what I understood is what will happen, I don't know that anymore. Did the developers get it wrong or has Canonical backed down?