The Linux Mint project announced today that they have decided to follow Canonical's decision to drop support for 32-bit system in future releases of their Ubuntu operating system.

As you might know, Canonical announced last month that they plan to drop support for 32-bit systems all together, not only for new installations, but they ended up realizing that some major projects like Wine and Steam still need 32-bit libraries, so starting with Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) they'll only build select 32-bit packages.

Many users were asking if Ubuntu-based distributions will be affected by this major change, which shouldn't be a surprize to anyone in 2019, so it looks like Linux Mint, one of the most popular Ubuntu-based operating systems out there will follow on Ubuntu's steps to drop support for 32-bit systems in future releases, starting with Linux Mint 20.

"The announcement from Canonical that 32-bit support was to be dropped in Ubuntu 20.04 means that the future Linux Mint 20 will only be able to be released in 64-bit," said Clement Lefebvre. "Linux Mint 19.x is already available in 32-bit and it can be used until 2023. I think most people are happy with this and dropping 32-bit releases going forward makes sense in 2020."

Certain 32-bit apps will be supported

Clement Lefebvre also confirmed that certain 32-bit apps will run on future Linux Mint releases, just like they will run on future Ubuntu releases. These include Wine, Steam for Linux, as well as other popular applications and games that require 32-bit libraries to be present in the operating system or in the main software repositories.

Linux Mint 20 will be based on the next LTS (Long Term Support) version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which will be out in April 2020. Work on Linux Mint 20 hasn't started yet as the team currently works on releasing the second update to the Linux Mint 19 series, Linux Mint 19.2, but we can expect it to be released sometime in summer 2020, only for 64-bit computers.