It was brought to our attention that the upcoming Lubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system series may continue to support 32-bit installations if there's demand from users.

After it was decided earlier this year when the development of the next Lubuntu release, 18.10, kicked off that 32-bit installations will be dropped, Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley informs us that the team behind the lightweight GNU/Linux distribution wants to give 32-bit support one more chance if there's still demand from the community.

Starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release, which is currently scheduled for an October 18, 2018, release, the official flavors won't be shipping with 32-bit installation images, except Lubuntu if users are interested in helping testing and 32-bit (i386) ISOs. Otherwise, Lubuntu 18.10 will not ship with 32-bit installation images.

"We understand that there is still interest for keeping the i386 images for Lubuntu, and thus, have not dropped it like the majority of other Ubuntu flavors have," said Simon Quigley in his latest weekly newsletter. "So, if you have i386 machines that you are still using Lubuntu on, please help us test, or the images will no longer be released."

Here's how you can help

If you still have an i386 machine and you want to help the Lubuntu team continue maintaining and release 32-bit (i386) installation images for the next Lubuntu release, you must download the 32-bit installation images from the official ISO QA tracker for i386 architectures, install them on your PC and test them thoroughly. As usual, bugs and other issues can be reported via Launchpad.

However, if there's not enough testing for the community for the Lubuntu 18.10 32-bit installation images and if several i386-specific bugs remain unfixed, the Lubuntu team will not release 32-bit ISO images for Lubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), which will ship with the latest LXQt 0.13.0 desktop environment by default instead of the LXDE desktop that was used until now.