Ubuntu’s 32-bit lib support: will they, won’t they?

While we’ve known for a while that Ubuntu would be dropping support for 32-bit hardware, Canonical on 18 June revealed that it was planning on going even further, by announcing that Ubuntu 19.10 would no longer natively support 32-bit libraries) – effectively preventing users from running 32-bit software. This includes popular applications like and , as well as many games. Canonical tried to head off any criticism by suggesting that developers of 32-bit software could publish their applications as Snaps, which will enable them to use the ‘core18’ runtime that 32-bit needs, via the existing Ubuntu 18.04 archive. Meanwhile, users were told they could try running 32-bit software in a virtual machine or LXD container – or run an older release of Ubuntu, such as 16.04 LTS.