ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Unix One <unix1@xxxxxxxx>]

On 02/24/2017 12:10 PM, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Fri, 2017-02-24 at 18:28 +0100, Matthias Apitz wrote:
>> It is, because the click pkg are EOL and the snap require 64-bit
>
> No. Anyone should be able to create snap based images for 32-bit
> devices if they wish. However, I think as only new devices coming to
> market at this point are really going to be 64-bit, the goal is to only
> support 64-bit for official device images. For example, see the
> discussions previously about no longer building final release ISOs of
> Ubuntu for i386, or how there haven't been ones for PowerPC for a while
> now. However, both of those architectures are still built in the
> archive, and some derivatives still build releases for those
> architectures.

In my mind, this logic makes complete sense, as it does for Ubuntu i386 
example, if most devices on the market are 64-bit and it is of very 
little benefit to support older hardware via official channels. In fact, 
Ubuntu has indeed officially supported i386 concurrently with 64-bit 
during many years of transition.

As for Ubuntu Touch phones, since 100% of existing phone devices are 
32-bit, there are no 64-bit phones even being planned (at least 
publicly), wiping 32-bit future official support outright alienates the 
core power users and developers - i.e. pretty much everyone - in a 
frustrating way.

Sure, community could decide to backport Ubuntu Touch updates to legacy 
phones (has anyone volunteered/committed to doing so?), or they could 
decide to move on and do something else completely different instead 
with their time.

I guess personally for me, MWC is the last glimmer of hope - a miracle 
announcement of a modern 64-bit dev phone to replace mako, but I don't 
know how much I'd be willing to bet on that.