Wednesday 9 May 2018

Re: Proposal: Let's drop i386

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Hello,

On 05/09/2018 04:29 PM, Walter Lapchynski wrote:
<snip />
>> here are some i386 to amd64 ratios for 18.04:
>> Lubuntu cdimage - 0.87
>
> And there is my concern. That says the vast majority of Lubuntu's users
> are using i386. The question becomes whether or not they have to. There
> has been documentation all over the place to download i386 if you don't
> know which is the right one and so people may still be running on this.
> So maybe the number is skewed. But if it's not, does this mean Lubuntu
> becomes irrelevant?

You're misreading the statistics. *Less* people use i386, not more. 87
i386 users per 100 amd64 users.

Additionally, with Lubuntu modernizing a bit, I would argue that Lubuntu
can and will still stay relevant in the future. This is before we
dropped LXDE, and it's the LTS. We can judge whether or not Lubuntu is
still relevant by seeing how the LXQt transition plays out.

Also, to be fair, Lubuntu 18.04 could be considered for sort of a niche
audience; people who need to run Linux (specifically, with LXDE and
Ubuntu) on older machines. Lubuntu's LXQt transition does modernize
things a bit, while still preserving some of those light selling points.

I would also not use this as a determining factor, because we have no
idea how things will look three years from now. My best guess is that
i386 users will drastically diminish.

>> The first step would be to all agree on dropping images/installers but
>> we should keep the end goal of dropping the port in mind ideally soon
>> as well.
>
> Maybe keeping only the netboot image might make sense?

If the port goes away entirely, so will the netboot images.

--
Simon Quigley
tsimonq2@ubuntu.com
tsimonq2 on freenode and OFTC
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