Fedora Linux Moves Ahead With Effectively Demoting 32-bit x86 Support

[GraysonPeddie]

Good. Given that RHEL 7 doesn't support i686 any more, there shouldn't be any problems for Fedora to do the same thing. Though making i686 about as important as ARM would probably be a good idea.

And yes, i686 shouldn't be abandoned altogether; but these days i686 hardware should be running Gentoo anyway.



Define "left in the market". They haven't been produced since Bay Trail. The ones before that still exist, though (like my Oak Trail tablet).

I mean, "available." "... are there any netbooks available today that only have a 32-bit CPU"

[duby229]

Doesn't this affect steam in a way? (it is 32 bit i think)

Yep, but that's different because I don't think steam could max out the resources it can get as 32bits. But there are plenty of examples of games and software that easily do and should have moved on a long time ago.. Steam is handled by the package manager and is distributed in binary form. Fedora devs don't have to compile it, they just have to make sure its dependencies are met.

[GraysonPeddie]

Doesn't this affect steam in a way? (it is 32 bit i think)

As long as multilib support and 32-bit graphics libraries are installed in your system, Steam should run fine.

[Creak]

i always say that if you have a computer with less then 1GB or ram go for 32bit, else 64
but things are changing and the linux desktop is becoming bloated to hell, so id adjust that to 2GB of ram


too all these smartasses that say 32bit should be abandoned
learn assembly, it will make you realize that most programs execute as 32bit anyway and that C abstracts all this anyway
(so if your program crashes on 32bit, you made a bug and should fix it (it will probably crash your 64bit program too))
if you don't know the actual difference between amd64 and i686 then shut the fuck up
("more then 4gigs" is not the main difference, and isn't even true)
fkin idiots

edit:
also learn instruction encoding, you will see that amdx864 should be abandoned entirely
and no, not for arm, it sucks in a different way (CISC is better)
and not for power, it sucks with the modern concept of threading

As a matter of fact, I do know assembly, but I still think i686 is useless nowadays.
Your post, on the other hand, is not wrong, it's just out of the subject.
The problem is not about the fact that we need 64bit or 32bit platform. It's just that we'd rather see more frequent and predictable releases of Fedora, and I think that if the price to pay is to drop i686, then it's completely fair since it's not an important platform at all (except for some low-end machines, but Fedora does aim to run on such machines).

[ElectricPrism]

As long as multilib support and 32-bit graphics libraries are installed in your system, Steam should run fine.

They would be insane to not support 32-bit graphics libraries - I would never tolerate Fedora if Steam games didn't run, infact their reputation would immediately nose dive imo.

[justmy2cents]

They would be insane to not support 32-bit graphics libraries - I would never tolerate Fedora if Steam games didn't run, infact their reputation would immediately nose dive imo.

this is about dropping 32-bit install images (downloadable isos), not 32-bit support all together. and as wording goes even dropping is not correct. they want to make them non-blocking, which means that bugs in 32-bit install image cannot block release anymore. if they provided 32-bit images and they contained errors, they can be delayed separately without delaying whole Fedora release as now

[kaidenshi]

I don't use Fedora so this decision doesn't affect me directly. However, there are plenty of 32 bit machines out there that are useful today. My laptop is a Dell D400 with a Pentium M that is perfect for 99% of what I would need out of a mobile computer. It runs a very sensible OS for an old 32 bit machine (Slackware Linux) that will likely never drop support for the platform (though I believe Pat is finally moving from i486 to i586 as a bottom line with the coming release).

[CaptainBlood]

This month I migrated from (Arch Linux) x86_64 to i686 (I have been using x86_64 for 6 years).
Now I am able to have launched
* mpd, i3wm, dhcpcd, gnome-terminal, pulseaudio
* Sublime Text 3
* Palemoon (uBlock Origin, HTTPS Everywhere, 5 tabs)
* Chromium (2 tabs with 2 inspectors)
* Photoshop CS2 (with 1 opened 20MB .psd)
at the same time without using swap! I am very happy now (I have 2GB DDR2 and no money). I have around 30-40% more free RAM. I didn't notice worse performance (I measured by my eyes), though I haven't tried to play games.
Therefore, users of very small computers (like Google Glass) will be unhappy with Fedora.

This is a very good example why Fedora is technically mistaking...
I feel it's very much against sustainable dev, despite x86's have a quite bad Power per CPU Cycle rate compared to x64. Not to mention all the OLD PCI hardware many of them could host.
My guess is that this is economical decision, should it be only regarding workforce when not financial.
Very surprised by your RAM savings, I have a couple of those oversea. Maybe will give Gentoo a try on them.

[horizonbrave]

It looks hard to make everyone happy, and even if know it's not really a matter of architecture support, I'd like to see linux distros choosing a very specific target for their product (I don't know if this could apply to commercially backed products like fedora). It's very very nice to have choice, but sometimes I'm not sure that healthy competition means having a ton of distros trying to be the best desktop distro (in a niche market).

[Delgarde]

I could see people who might want to run Fedora in netbooks that don't have a 64-bit CPU, but are there any netbooks left in the market today that only have a 32-bit CPU? Shouldn't 4GB of RAM be the standard for netbooks? RAM is cheap these days.

It's not important whether there are any 32-bit netbooks on the market today - what's important is how many there are still in existence and trying to run modern Fedora releases. I do still have one, as it happens - an old Asus machine from ~2009, which still works passably on the occasions where I need a lightweight machine for travelling. Though I wouldn't be all that upset if Fedora stopped supporting ...