The problem is in businesses. At home, you'll cry a bit when your next-gen console isn't backward compatible, but you'll live with it. It's a new architecture, and by the time you're used to it, you'll laugh at all the "junk" you leave behind. Okay: some very retro-ish and cool stuff. That probably wasn't cheap, and even if it was it probably has nostalgic value.
Business, on the other hand, simply cannot afford to upgrade like that. They might have both hardware and software that suddenly refuses to work, and that can cause a whole chain of events happening. I mean...at my company we had to solve a nasty (but luckily pretty harmless) bitcoin miner worm this week. It got in through a windows XP computer. This is especially frustrating because our ICT department knew about the PC and its vulnerabilities, but it couldn't be replaced because it ran some sort of exotic kind of software that was absolutely crucial to the department, but where nonetheless nobody had a clue who built it or how to get it working on a recent computer. Result: "thanks to" this piece of malware, we stepped in and pretty much unplugged the device. Now suddenly, what had been lingering for months is fixed within a couple days.
Ahem...I know: the above story isn't exactly related to 32-bit but more about the way businesses work in general. It is also why windows continues to be successful, even though there's hardly any decent improvement on it in years. The same is true for 32-bit: at this point it's only there because of its legacy.
32-bits operating systems...of course linux distributions can chose to ditch them: as long as there are OTHER distro's that still offer it, those with outdated hardware can get it to work (the last distro that attempts to remove it will have some backlash, though
).
That ubuntu debacle isn't about that, though. It's about 32-bit software support on...well...ANY platform, really. They decided it wasn't worth pursuing the old architecture, which I can't really blame them for. And the userbase...it wouldn't be very diplomatic to call them greedy, but it's still the best description. And I've got to be honest: I'm greedy as well. Let's say investigation* would turn out that NOT having 32-bit driver support or installers or what have you would cause me to not be able to play ten of my thousand+ games on the system. In that case, my reaction would be "BUT I WANNA PLAY THOSE TEN GAMES!!!!". Because that is a quantifiable amount. Having a more secure, easier to maintain or otherwise better software environment is not something I can say I particularly care about as a consumer.
*in addition to greedy, I'm lazy as well: I have no freaking idea which of my games would be impacted in what kind of way in the first place.