Canonical Company a statement about the revision of plans related to the end of support for the 32-bit x86 architecture in Ubuntu 19.10. After studying the comments Wine and gaming developers have decided to build and ship a separate set of 32-bit packages on Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS.
The list of 32-bit packages shipped will be prepared based on community feedback and will include components needed to continue running legacy programs that remain 32-bit only or require 32-bit libraries. Moreover, if the list is not complete and missing packages are identified, then the set of packages is planned to be supplemented after the release.
It is claimed that the discussions and comments that arose after the announcement of the end of support for the i386 architecture came as a surprise to the developers of the distribution, since the issue of the end of support for i386 has been discussed in the community and among developers since 2014. The Ubuntu developers were under the impression that a consensus had been reached on the issue of deprecating i386 support and no pitfalls were expected, but as it turned out, some points were overlooked, including during consultations with Valve (note: probably some of the discussers could not imagine , that it will be decided not only to stop building i386 packages, but also to stop building the multiarch libraries needed to run 32-bit applications in a 64-bit environment).
In the long term, to support 32-bit applications in post-Ubuntu 20.04 releases, the plan is to work with WINE, Ubuntu Studio, and game vendors to use container isolation systems to ship 32-bit components from the Ubuntu LTS branch and run legacy applications. Based on Snaps and LXD, it will be possible to prepare the necessary 32-bit environment and a set of libraries.
Recall that the reason for the end of support for the i386 architecture is the impossibility of maintaining packages at the level of other architectures supported in Ubuntu, for example, due to the inaccessibility for 32-bit systems of the latest developments in the field of improving security and protecting against fundamental vulnerabilities such as Specter. Maintaining a package base for the i386 requires a lot of development and quality control resources, which are not justified by a small user base (the number of i386 systems is estimated at 1% of the total number of installed systems).
Source: opennet.ru