What will be the future of Wine on Ubuntu

[jkfloris]

I'm not sure if this forum is the right place to ask this question. If not please link me to the right place.

On discourse.ubuntu.com I read that Ubuntu will stop building i386-packages. In other words: Wine will not run on Ubuntu 19.10.
The Ubuntu solution is to create a VM with Ubuntu 18.04, but I expect a lot of questions on this forum about this.

What is the opinion of the wine developers about this? Does Ubuntu get the same treatment as CentOS/RHEL?

[dimesio]

You'd need to ask on wine-devel to find out the opinion of the Wine developers.

I can give you the opinion of the WineHQ package maintainer, which is that I can't build 32 bit Wine if the distro does not provide 32 bit libraries. The article you linked to suggests using 32 bit libraries from 18.04, which will be around until 2023. That may be doable for building the WineHQ packages, but users will also have to install those 32 bit libraries on their machines. No, we are not going to distribute them here.

[dimesio]

---and thinking further, apt requires the versions of i386 packages to match the amd64 versions exactly, or it will refuse to install them, so it seems likely that users of 19.10 won't be able to install them even if they wanted to.

[dimesio]

Discussion on wine-devel: https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-d ... 47869.html.

[aaronfranke]

"The downside of doing that is that we will spend a lot of time explaining to users that pure 64 bit Wine will not run 32 bit programs, no matter how many places we plaster that information."

Why is it not possible for 64-bit Wine to run 32-bit programs? I know that 32-bit Wine run 16-bit programs, so why not 32-bit on 64-bit?

I bet it would be a lot of work, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to make Wine use 64-bit system libraries for 32-bit programs if y'all tried to do so.

Remember that it's not just Linux; Wine runs on Mac too and now Mac is 64-bit only. Does Wine also plan to drop support for Mac? Furthermore, how long until other distros also drop 32-bit support? Does Wine plan to only support outdated systems in the future? I think running 32-bit software on 64-bit Wine is an absolute necessity, however it's accomplished.

[Cybermax]

Remember that it's not just Linux; Wine runs on Mac too and now Mac is 64-bit only. Does Wine also plan to drop support for Mac? Furthermore, how long until other distros also drop 32-bit support? Does Wine plan to only support outdated systems in the future? I think running 32-bit software on 64-bit Wine is an absolute necessity, however it's accomplished.

I must say that "we will drop i386" kinda hit like a bombshell, but it may depend on how it is implemented.

I am not really sure how the solution looks tho, cos if wine is to be a "run windows programs under Linux" kind of thing, there is no such thing as "pure 64-bit" i guess. Not only is there extreme amounts of software out there today that will NEVER be updated to 64-bit, but even 64-bit programs still have 32-bit tidbits in them (like installers and whatnot). So from a compatibility point of view, wine will NOT work without 32-bit support.

If building 32-bit support requires linux i386 libraries, Ubuntu will be a unsupported distro from that time. If it is just a "Ubuntu thing", and plenty of other distros will continue supporting i386 libraries, it is not the end of the world. Time to switch distro in that case... but if it is a general "Linux distros will drop i386" kind of thing, well... Someone has got some work ahead of them

[dimesio]

I must say that "we will drop i386" kinda hit like a bombshell, but it may depend on how it is implemented.

As I mentioned on wine-devel, openSUSE Leap has been released as 64 bit only for several years, but they have continued to provide packages for all the 32 bit compatibility libraries Wine needs. But the Ubuntu article says "this means we will not provide 32-bit builds of new upstream versions of libraries," which sounds like they're not going to do that. And when they're handing out advice like "Try 64-bit WINE first. Many applications will “just work”," I'd say the people making this decision seem to know less about Wine than a typical Ubuntu user.

Well, the official Ubuntu advice seems to be to install packages built for 18.04. Users can certainly try that with the WineHQ packages. If they don't work or cause problems in newer Ubuntu versions, complain to Ubuntu about it.

[dimesio]

Steam has dropped support of Ubuntu. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/ste ... for-ubuntu

On the plus side, perhaps that will get Canonical's attention.

[Gcenx]

Steam has dropped support of Ubuntu. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/06/ste ... for-ubuntu

On the plus side, perhaps that will get Canonical's attention.

It's sad to me when Ubuntu was always the recommended newbie friendly distro for basically everything now to remove multilib support and claiming that using wine64 "will just work", I don't think the developer even understand that using wine64 to launch a 32bit application just causes wineserver to launch then launch wine to run the 32bit application ........


Then you have Pop!_OS who despite being a Ubuntu derivate get the need for multilib are will continue to offer it themselves

Not for our driver packaging. Building for i386 doesn't require any more effort than building for amd64. The build server handles that automatically. All we'd need to do is rebuild the Debian packages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... g/erskxu2/


Honestly if Ubuntu don't about turn on this issue I can actually see more Distro's eventually following suite.

[aaronfranke]

Despite y'all insisting that this is impossible, it seems that Codeweavers successfully was able to add support for running 32-bit programs on 64-bit Wine, with the release of Crossover 19 for Mac. I assume that such changes can be upstreamed to Wine and made to work for Linux too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments ... upport_on/

[SetantaLP]

It's not impossible, but a lot of work, that can easily be avoided. And as mentioned by some users in a thread (see viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32590) in the macOS section the way Codeweavers did it, will most likely be not implemented in wine, since it's more or less a make it work solution (since Apple completely dropped 32bit support in Catalina and it's hardly possible to stay on Mojave if you need the latest version of Xcode (e.g. for iOS Development)) that is (as far as I know) only made to allow using 32bit apps on macOS and also relies on a custom compiler. And besides that, I'm quite sure that this definitely has some drawbacks (overhead, slightly different behaviour, ...) that can lead into problems.

[Cybermax]

It is not an abrupt end of 32-bit, as Canonical kinda did a step back due to a lot of gripe around this. So, as we CLEARLY have seen so far this year, 19.10 builds wine just fine with all 32-bit libraries in question, and from what i gather here: https://ubuntu.com/blog/statement-on-32 ... -20-04-lts

This led us to stop creating Ubuntu install media for i386 last year and to consider dropping the port altogether at a future date. It has always been our intention to maintain users’ ability to run 32-bit applications on 64-bit Ubuntu – our kernels specifically support that.

Meaning: Nah, 32-bit is not "dead".

But sure... the end IS coming, its just not instant next year... And tbh if it happens in 2-3 years, AND this is not "only" a Ubuntu/Debian "problem", the community should look into building i686/syswow64 wine rather than i386+amd64 like it is today. Yeah, terminology is wrong, but dunno what else to call it... Microsoft does not sell 32-bit windows, and has not for a few years, so why would Linux distro's keep producing i386 images. Having a select few packages for compatibility is the way forward, but that should not mean there would be no way to run 32-bit apps.

Its just that Wine is a huge project that STILL have a "pure" 32-bit version. That is perhaps not the correct "vision" one should have, and rather provide pure 32-bit as somewhat of a curiosity for special needs (that would require separate maintainers in the likes of -staging perhaps). So, we got 2-3 years of convincing wine-devs that they should drop 32-bit! Send some e-mails to the mailing lists, cos maybe they cba to actually read posts on the random supportforum

[SetantaLP]

Its just that Wine is a huge project that STILL have a "pure" 32-bit version. That is perhaps not the correct "vision" one should have, and rather provide pure 32-bit as somewhat of a curiosity for special needs (that would require separate maintainers in the likes of -staging perhaps). So, we got 2-3 years of convincing wine-devs that they should drop 32-bit! Send some e-mails to the mailing lists, cos maybe they cba to actually read posts on the random supportforum

The problem is: the main purpose of wine is to allow the user to run software that is build for windows. So as long as Microsoft doesn't drop 32bit support in windows, it's required that wine is able to run 32bit software. Yea modern software (especially games) is usually 64bit-only, but sometimes there are still components that require 32bit like installers. And if you want to run older software you definitely need 32bit. So as long as there is no other tool (maybe some wine derivate or something like DOSBox for 16bit software), it's definitely not a good idea to drop 32bit support in wine.

By the way, one unexpected side effect for an average macOS user of Apple dropping 32bit support recently in macOS Catalina, is that some quite recent games (e.g. Shadow Tactics, which was released in December 2016, which is just 3 years ago) no longer run because they use Unity. And on macOS Unity has been a 32bit-only application until the release of Unity 2018.1 (which is 64bit-only on macOS), while on windows Unity already had a 64bit version (alongside with a 32bit version). I don't know why that was the case (especially since in contrast to windows macOS was already a 64bit OS for quite a long time (so releasing 32bit only software doesn't really make sense), while windows still has a 32bit OS version) but things like that happen.