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Wubi was discontinued as of 13.04. 13.04 was marked as end-of-life in January of 2014. So, why do we still have questions about Wubi? What is the purpose if Wubi is now off-topic?

I think that questions about Wubi should be blocked, as there is no use for them anymore.

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  • @EliahKagan: The DuplicateFinderBot of AskUbuntu.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Sep 7, 2014 at 5:54

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR

Wubi was only "discontinued" by a very strange sense of that term, as it continues shipping on official Ubuntu ISOs and working.

Furthermore, even if we were to consider Wubi unsupported starting with 13.04, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS remains supported and won't be end-of-life for about 2.5 more years.

Now for the details...


Some background information on the current status of Wubi:

Wubi continues to ship with new versions of Ubuntu and to be maintained. 13.04 was apparently the only release that didn't have wubi.exe on the official desktop ISO.

It's true that we're generally trying to discourage people from using Wubi on the new releases. There is also the issue that with a preinstalled Windows 8 system, Wubi won't work (though there are still many Windows users not falling in that category).

On other systems, Wubi still does work, even with the latest releases of Ubuntu. When run from the CD, wubi.exe now acts to prompt the user to reboot and install Ubuntu in the usual way. When copied off of the CD, it continues to work.

Considering that it continues officially shipping with Ubuntu, I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say it's "discontinued" in the sense relevant to deciding what's end-of-life for our purposes.

  • I've just double checked this: wubi.exe is present on the 14.04.1 CD (I checked ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso).

    It is even on the Utopic daily-live images (I checked utopic-desktop-amd64.iso from 20140830), foreshadowing its continued presence when 14.10 is released.

Anyway, the biggest problem with this proposal is that, even by the narrowest possible interpretation of the term, Wubi is officially supported for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. While 12.10, 13.04, and 13.10 are end-of-life, 12.04 is an LTS release and remains supported through April 2017.

  • The presence of wubi.exe on the latest 12.04 point release images wouldn't be a necessary condition to consider Wubi still supported for 12.04, because all the people who have installed Wubi systems are running supported releases and should be able to get help here through April 2017.

    But it is there. I checked ubuntu-12.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso. It contains wubi.exe, as expected.

Since Wubi is still supported, at least on 12.04 (and we should likely consider it supported on later releases too), we shouldn't try to keep people from asking questions about it here. We shouldn't close questions for being about Wubi. And we certainly shouldn't remove or blacklist Wubi tags to create the impression that Wubi is unsupported or off-topic.


However, if Wubi were unsupported and off-topic, we would still not blacklist these tags. (You've tagged this meta question so I presume this is part of what you're advocating.) Tag blacklisting is reserved for serious cases where a tag is doing considerable harm (or creating a huge heap of extra administrative work for the community). If Wubi were unsupported and off-topic, we'd want Wubi-related tags to continue existing for the same reason we have tags for some unofficial derivatives like :

  • Some questions would be incidentally on-topic. We help people use Ubuntu to access files from (broken or not) Windows systems; presumably we'd help them use an Ubuntu live environment to access files from Wubi. At least some questions about migrating from Wubi to regular Ubuntu systems would be on-topic.
  • We'd have a number of old questions about Wubi, many with valuable answers. There would be no good reason to delete them and destroy that information (more precisely: render it widely inaccessible). Those questions would still benefit from good tagging.
  • For people who pay attention to our site's rules and scope, there would be a tag wiki explaining that most Wubi-related questions are off-topic.
  • For people who don't pay attention to our site's rules and scope, there would be a Wubi tag we could monitor to efficiently identify posts for closure. (Not all new posts tagged that way would qualify for closure, but like with the tag, many would.)

That's all hypothetical at this point, though: many existing Wubi systems are not end-of-life and Wubi remains well within the scope of our site.

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  • Have you run the wubi.exe file? If offers NOTHING of the sort.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Aug 31, 2014 at 7:02
  • @Whaaaaaat What part(s) of my post are you responding to? Are you saying Wubi.exe doesn't really install Wubi? (Even on 12.04?) Aug 31, 2014 at 7:06
  • On the latest 14.04 ISO the Wubi.exe file doesn't install Wubi. I don't have the bandwidth to test the other ISOs.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Aug 31, 2014 at 7:07
  • @Whaaaaaat That sounds wrong to me; are you absolutely sure? I have not run the 14.04 version of wubi.exe. Do you think this answer, specifically focusing on 14.04 and explaining about how it does in fact still work and remains supported, is wrong? Or is it simply that it did not work for you? What Windows OS did you try it on? And if it's Windows 8, is UEFI enabled? Aug 31, 2014 at 7:08
  • I just tested it DIRECTLY off of the ISO and it gave me no such option. It says to reboot.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Aug 31, 2014 at 7:09
  • Copying it off the disc does give me the wubi install prompt, but I'm not sure it works.
    – Kaz Wolfe
    Aug 31, 2014 at 7:10
  • @Whaaaaaat I believe Dima's meta answer (which was cited in Rinzwind's main answer), explains the status of Wubi, and establishes that it remains supported and that wubi.exe included on official Ubuntu desktop images can still be used to install Wubi, even in 14.04. I'll add a link to Dima's answer to make things clearer in my answer here. (We might also consider this meta question to be a duplicate of that one.) Aug 31, 2014 at 7:15
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    and to be maintained. Are you sure? I don't think it is actively developed or maintained anymore, just tacked on the images.
    – Seth
    Aug 31, 2014 at 14:41
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    @Seth Each Ubuntu release has its own separate wubi.exe. (You can verify this by comparing its md5sums; e.g., 13.10 vs. 14.04.) See also "Recent revisions" on lp:wubi. Most are just updating the URLs from which wubi.exe can find and download Ubuntu ISOs when run in standalone make-a-Wubi-installation mode, but these are changes made so Wubi can continue to be used in its "discontinued" capacity. (Rev. 281 fixes a bug in making Wubi installs.) Aug 31, 2014 at 19:42

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