Intel 32bit packages on Ubuntu from 19.10 onwards

Hi, I’m jre, (co-)maintainer of Wine in Debian, and the one who worked to bring our packages to the Ubuntu archives. I was only aware of dropping the i386 images (talked to xnox about this in 2016), but unfortunately not the current plan. AFAIK the same goes for Wine upstream.

Upstream started discussing Ubuntu’s plan here. Please have a look at that discussion and take part in it.

A few points:

Wine heavily relies on i386. Not only for legacy 32-bit software, but also “almost all” 64-bit software uses a 32-bit installer.[1] “It’s practically impossible to implement 32-bit on top of 64-bit”, so that you wouldn’t need i386 at all.[2]. So although Wine will still be available in the Ubuntu archive on amd64, it’ll be basically useless.

To support current features in new Wine releases you need recent versions of a few libraries (e.g. faudio, vulkan-loader and vkd3d, and those require other recent stuff like sdl2, …).[3] If you use our Debian packages also current versions of unicode-data and khronos-api. 18.04 is already too old to fully support current Wine with (all) current features. So the solutions proposed in [4] like containers and snaps based on 18.04 will not fully work. I’m not sure how well Wine (which uses the same libraries from amd64 AND i386) would work with a static /lib/i386-linux-gnu.

Upstream is not planning to ship all dependencies for their OBS build, and will probably just stop to build for 19.10+.[5] This is not to say that they are not interested in working on a solution.

About solutions, can you confirm these assumptions:

  • the kernel will still support 32-bit executables
  • you can’t use i386-PPAs for 19.10+

I’ve been told that users already leave Ubuntu, because our Debian packages are not providing good enough system integration (most notably they don’t install a wine.desktop file, but ship it as example only). The 6-line instructions for upstream’s packages are also frequently criticized as too difficult. With whatever solution whoever comes up with, I fear this would drive even more Ubuntu users away.

[EDIT] I was a new user, so could only post 2 links. Here’s the rest:
[1] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147874.html
[2] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147959.html
[3] https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32061
[4] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2018-May/040348.html
[5] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2019-June/147904.html

16 Likes