Am not an ubuntu developer or someone with influence or power to change this decision but I would like to give my personal opinion about this and how it impacts my life for the better part of the last 15 years,just to give a point of view of someone who has personally taken ubuntu to the core.

Since around 2008 I have promoted ubuntu over other distros, over windows and even over mac. Basically a bit more than a decade. I managed to help somewhere around 2k new users to Ubuntu that most still enjoy it today. Of the many points I got asked, one always stands out, which is gaming on linux. In this case, gaming on Ubuntu.

This is my biggest selling point to convince most users to not only use but also stay on Linux. In my particular life, convince, teach and make someone love ubuntu, stay on it and enjoy it everyday.

If you check on askubuntu you will see a wine question that was created a long time ago with the effort of communicating to the public and showing new users that you can potentially play windows games on Ubuntu, run Microsoft products on Ubuntu and do many things that I had to fight, struggle and dedicate myself in order to find ways for new users to end up loving ubuntu (got a bit carried away but it has been10 years dedicated to ubuntu here). So when this announcement came, I actually thought it was a great idea. I mean it’s 2019 and 64 bit stuff is almost 2 decades old. So I was all for it. But then I saw the post about wine developers and the issues they would have, potentially crippling new users and existing users to stay in Ubuntu. Then today I see the one about steam and what their thoughts are about leaving Ubuntu 19.10 and future versions. Basically killing the biggest points I use to promote Ubuntu for everyone.

Obviously this is not critical from a development point of view, but I hope someone reads this and understands the effort I have put for an operating system (and even a community like askubuntu) and then see all of this happening and the negative effect it would have primarily on the community. I hope this small grain of sand helps a bit in reversing this decision, looking for an alternative (which I can see it is being worked on) but not affect the community in a way that would make ubuntu a distro that is npt an option for many users. Thank you.