Sunsetting i386

Lubuntu has been and continues to be the go-to Ubuntu flavor for people who want the most from their computers, especially older hardware that cannot handle today’s workloads. However, the project and computing as a whole has drastically changed in many ways since its origin ten years ago. Computers have become faster, more secure, and most notably, have moved off of the traditional 32-bit i686 (generalized as i386 in Debian and Ubuntu) architecture.

As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021.

We would like to sincerely thank the contributors to and the users of Lubuntu on i386. Without you, Lubuntu would not be what it is today. The Lubuntu Team would like encourage you to read our post regarding taking a new direction if you would like to understand more about our future aspirations as a project. Lubuntu is far from slowing down; if you would like to join our growing team of contributors, check out our Telegram/Matrix/IRC channels.