Suddenly, Ubuntu has prepared to follow the same way that other main distributions have, and drop the 32bit ISO images from the future releases.
Dimitri John Ledkov (Canonical engineer) said on Wednesday that Ubuntu will drop 32bit Desktop ISO images from the 17.10 release. He sent an email to the release team, telling them to not deliver a 32bit ISO for the future Ubuntu release.
According to Dimitri:
“Dear Release team, Please action the below and remove Ubuntu Desktop i386 daily-live images from the release manifest for Beta and Final milestones of 17.10 and therefore do not ship ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso artifact for 17.10. As a followup to this thread it has been confirmed that argumentation below is sound, and furthermore there is no longer any effective qa or testing of the desktop product on actual i386 hardware (explicitly non x86_64 CPUs). There are no other changes requested to d-i, mini.iso, archive, or the upgrade paths. Regards, Dimitri.”
Ubuntu users don’t need to worry because they are able to upgrade the current installation to the latest release when it comes out and still keep their 32bit system, the step will only affect users that want to install new Ubuntu system from an ISO image.
The site has previously taken down the download links for live CDs in 32-bit, over the desktop, server or cloud deployment.
