Opera developer 30, now available as 32-bit on Linux

April 15th, 2015

Today we provide a 32-bit Linux version of our previous developer release. Sadly, there is no Linux 64-bit version this time around—some changes we originally made to accommodate the 32-bit version on our build systems, actually broke the 64-bit version. 😉 We have already fixed the issue internally, so the next release should have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for Linux.

32-bit Linux? Why now?

Back in Opera developer 24 we released the first (64-bit) Linux builds. At the time a few people were surprised that we only provided 64-bit binaries. We chose to do this because we could only afford to dedicate limited resources to Linux. This in conjunction with the following observations made the choice a no-brainer in our eyes:

Our developers, QAs and other Linux using staff all used 64-bit systems
Most of our Opera 12 Linux users ran the 64-bit version
Within the last 5 years almost no 32-bit only PC hardware has been released

As one would expect, usage of 32-bit Linux desktop systems continues to decrease. Despite this, we have always aspired to try and offer a 32-bit Linux version. In my own conversations with users on Twitter, bug reports and elsewhere I have found people with legitimate reasons for continuing to run 32-bit Linux desktops. This is for them, as a thanks for sticking with us and caring enough to ask for a build. We really appreciate your support!

I am not going to promise that we won’t drop 32-bit again. It is inevitable that with the passage of time, usage of 32-bit Linux systems will have dropped so low that it will not be worth the support effort to continue making and testing the builds. Even now these builds are getting less internal testing and hence they may be more buggy. I hope that by the time we pull support for 32-bit again our loyal users will have found themselves suitable 64-bit hardware.

Known issues

No 64-bit build this time—they will be back, in the next release.
You should use --no-install-recommends if test installing 32-bit Opera on a 64-bit system via apt or aptitude
opera://about may report “An error occurred while checking for updates”