The post is really very informative.

Thank you for giving me tips on lib32 troubleshooting.

Ubuntu dropped the bomb - they are discontinuing 32-bit packages. Completely. Not just the distro - multiarch ones. I suppose GOG will now need to recommend another offical distro for supported games? Ubuntu and Mint are out.

Dropping 32-bit installs is fair enough, but to drop 32-bit support entirely? That is "New Coke" levels of retarded and will break a ton of proprietary software, especially games considering how many legacy games (and even many newer games) are 32-bit only. Mint will still be fine for now as it's Ubuntu LTS based, but it'll be very interesting to see what they do for Mint 20.

It'll also be very interesting to see where displaced users move to.

I am at a loss for words.

I'd say those who use Ubuntu or Mint can move to Debian proper (I'd recommend Debian testing). It would be least disrupting for them, than let's say moving to Arch, Fedora or openSUSE.

More adventurous of course could try very different distros.

Are there any newer games that are 32-bit? The last such outlier I remember was Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. Developers there really struggled, but didn't manage to make 64-bit version work due to some messed up middleware. So it got stuck at 32-bit.

This is really bad news. Switching to another distro would be one of the easier solutions, but to which one?
I fear GOG may use this as an excuse to drop Linux support altogether.

I guess it's possible that Mint could provide 32-bit packages themselves (or collaborate with another group to do so), but I think it's most likely that Mint will switch to using Debian as the base instead. Linux Mint Debian Edition already exists as a contingency plan: Whatever happens, I'm going to look into the alternatives and have a plan ready.

It's primarily legacy software that will be affected. In addition to games, this move will especially hurt Wine given the vast amount of 32-bit only Windows software that exists.

My personal recommendation - Debian testing. I use GOG games with it for years and it works quite well. There are some quirks that might need to be addressed sometimes, due to Debian testing being ahead of Ubuntu generally, but nothing major.

I surely hope not.

I'd call it “dropped the ball” or “shooting themselves in the foot”. That's a really stupid thing. It seems that they want to get rid of everyone that uses (legacy) commercial software.

I don't see why should they, it's no different than an old Windows game not able to run on Win10. GOG seems to stick to Ubuntu LTS releases for official support and for 32bit games they can simply keep listing that as latest supported.

As for Ubuntu, I think it will become even less popular among gamers and at the same time maybe encourage devs to stop producing 32bit games.

sure, they can do that for some time. But at some point official support for Ubuntu 18.04 (and earlier) will run out. And selling games that only work on outdated & no longer supported platforms isn't really a convincing business strategy ;)

There's no issue with commercial SW, even legacy one, but with closed source SW.

And I don't think majority of community behind these distros even care, honestly the closed source SW in used very rarely, and lot of it has now decent alternatives in OSS.

It's pretty much total rare corner case situations like games or very specific SW, where there's no good alternative and discarding x86 will kill the SW, but 99% of the important SW is OSS, and not affected.

And closed source SW was always a zombie, dead upon arrival... it may work for a while when released, but if you clinch on it, you are doing disservice yourself, because it's destiny is sealed since the start.

I personally find it somewhat unlucky, that from my GOG linux games (~350+ games from 1k if I can believe the web filter) I will probably lose access to ~half of them (or I will need virtual machine with some old version of linux installed), but recent years I rarely play games anyway, so my buying was already more about support to developers and just collecting... But I'm not surprised, this is something what was inevitable. Whether it happens already in 2019 or 2030 doesn't matter that much to me.

That sounds like a bad idea. GOG better find another distro which doesn't plan to drop multiarch with 32-bit x86.

Exactly. Better be pro-active about it for GOG.

Almost all commercial software is closed source. Anything else is, sadly, completely unrealistic. If you consider closed source software dead on arrival, you shouldn't buy any games. HyperRogue and KeeperRL are the only games I can think of at the top of my head that are open source and still in development. I'm sure that there are other examples, but they are very rare.

And if you think that 99% of the important software is open source, you are deluding yourself. If that was the case everyone would be using only open source software and open source operation systems would dominate the market. And, sadly, they don't – unless you are only talking about servers. Ironically many people that are dismissive on Linux, and I include GOG in this, use websites that are hosted on Linux servers or use Linux servers for their infrastructure (hello, GOG).

Without lib32 you will also lose access to many Windows titles through wine. I'm glad that I ditched everything that that user un-friendly company Ubuntu dictates (Unity, Mir, …).