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That decision came LONG AGO before I was even here. I don't have that original decision, because I believe that was created back when Ask Ubuntu was created during design/proposal, and wasn't a meta decision. HOWEVER, there have been requests to drop the EOL thing in the past and it was not received well by the community.
In your three cases: (1) Users with 32bit processors are required to find an alternative system for their aging hardware - the 32bit OS drop was decided by Canonical and Ubuntu itself, years ago. (2) 32bit build on 64bit OS can still install a new Ubuntu that's 64bit and backup their data first. (3) Software that has compat with 64bit environments is for the most part 'legacy software' nowadays, and that's usually the case of users using software that stopped being developed and is suffering bitrot as well (not in our control)
that's a decision that's beyond you and me. The point of "End of Life" is a device or release is no longer supported. 32bit has been dead in Ubuntu since actually 19.04 - why do we on Ask Ubuntu need to continue supporting hardware which Upstream Ubuntu no longer supports, or to extend this, if a specific product goes end of life why do we need to continue to support it beyond its death date when we can't do things like "suggest updating the software affected" or "install specific software" when the repositories go away?
Those who need continued 18.04 'support' can use ESM but they will get limited support. Once a release goes into ESM it is beyond the purview of community support, and we won't have the capacity to assist if the 18.04 repos go into a locked mode. Let me put this another way: if 19.04 - a long dead EOL release - was the last 32-bit supported Ubuntu, would you be making this argument for the 9 month release instead? Because technically speaking, anything that goes End of Life is no longer supportable, regardless of the 32bit/64bit issue
There's a cut-off for when we usually don't remove posts that're ancient, the post was marked from 2017. Gutsy is also dead. The post has upvotes, which is a control for 'deletion' because it has votes, and we try as a rule to not invalidate 'old' upvotes by post deletion. Easier to put a notice on the question that this no longer works, and is no longer valid in later Ubuntu releases, given that 'rule' we try to follow as moderators.
Yes, flag these. Either use Mod attention custom flags or No Longer Needed, but mod attention is probably the better flag with a description in this case.
@heynnema it's up to each moderator who handles those flags as to judgement. Only the mod who did the delete can explain the judgement of them for their removal. It's also not my position to point fingers, so my suggestion is "go take a break and a walk" and cool off before coming back to have a civil discussion on these things. Your tone suggests you're angry and aggressive, so go take a walk.
you've been here long enough to know that people can downvote for whatever reason and not leave feedback. The accusatory tone in your post is probably offputting and making people consider this in a negative tone. Which makes sense for people to just downvote and not comment.
