Canonical announced today that it finally decided to completely drop support for 32-bit (i386) hardware architectures in future releases of its popular Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Last year, during the development cycle of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, Canonical announced that they won't offer 32-bit installation images (ISOs), a trend that was shortly followed by all official Ubuntu Linux flavors with the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release. However, Ubuntu's 32-bit repositories were still available.

As Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) will be supported for the next five years, Canonical disabled upgrades from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.10 for 32-bit systems to avoid leaving users on a short-lived release, and now, they announced that starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) release, support for 32-bit system will no longer be provided.

"The Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture," said Steve Langasek in an email. "Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the Eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure."

32-bit applications can still run on Ubuntu

While Canonical will no longer offer 32-bit programs for its upcoming Ubuntu releases, the company said that it will still be possible to run 32-bit applications on the Linux-based operating system if users want to use certain apps. These can be made available to users by application developers through a supported file format, probably Snap, Flatpak or AppImage.

Canonical also said that they will provide more details about the removal of 32-bit support in Ubuntu Linux in the coming months as Ubuntu 19.10 gets closer to the beta and final release later this fall to instruct existing users on how to proceed if they still have 32-bit programs installed. Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) will be released on October 17th, 2019.