Comment 165 for bug 930447

> That said, they deliberatly broke the Pentium-M by checking for the PAE flag.

And this breaks upgrades, hopefully this will be fixed so upgrades get blocked before systems get broken, see bug #1160346 ("do-release-upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 on Pentium-M fails, breaks system without any warning")

> P.S. I didn't mean to sound to offensive, but no developer has responded with a
> very valid technical response. The only answers we have gotten 'its no longer
> supported, cus I said so'.

The technical discussion was at http://ubuntu.5.x6.nabble.com/Dropping-i386-non-PAE-as-a-supported-kernel-flavour-in-Precise-Pangolin-td731288i20.html - the conclusion / ultimate reason for dropping was:

"Dropping this flavour saves 5 minutes per build on a 4-way 80 thread
server, which for some of the team can add up to quite a bit of time
over the course of a day. Its one less variant that needs to be tested
in Q/A, and its one less flavour we have to mess with in our meta and
LBM packages. "

Also noted in same discussions on lubuntu list was that Ubuntu only targets a 3 year hardware support window, so any hardware older than 3 years can be dropped. Ubuntu is not a distribution for old hardware.

Whether it was a good decision or not is a moot point now, it is done, and for a Pentium-M user it is easier to choose a distribution that still supports that CPU rather than try to install a distribution that does not.

> So if this truely is about support, then stop supporting the 32 bit architecture.

I am sure it is being considered for the same reasons, Apple already dropped 32-bit, and Windows 8 will be the last 32-bit release.