Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support

[dungeon]

Obligatory remark: Steam statistics are bullshit on average, even on Windows.

That said, who cares about people on windows in a discussion about people on linux again?

People are people, no difference... they say what they use and that is it.

Microsoft released WIndows 10 32bit AFAIR because they said something like 30 million users still wants it... percentage is not different for Linux too i think, if we claim that we have 2% of market... basically that still means and it is quite possible how 600K Linux users care about 32bit OS . And why? Because people are the same, have same x86 hardware here and there - so the same possiblity...

[Niarbeht]

Long live Gentoo!
The one and only that is all about choice.
Runs with ot without systemd and runs even on i486. Or on your latest and greates amd64 or a hacked gaming-console.

For those who just blare "yeah, kill non-64bit-x86 with fire": You have no clue. Or you are too young. Or both.
There are still enough machines out there doing a fine job "even" with a "lowly" 32bit x86 CPU. Automates, embedded systems, machines in private households, boxes driving expensive measurement devices in laboratories... It's good that there are still some who will support it.

Any why should supporting a "different" arch be stopping progress? With the same "right" you could say: Why support Linux/BSD? Don't hamper the progress of Windows10!

Supporting a CPU architecture takes time and effort and energy. Are you gonna pay people to do something they don't want to bother with doing anymore?

Stop being ridiculous. Gentoo will drop support for anything and everything that people don't want to bother supporting.

[Holograph]

This will make my netbook sad...

Netbooks were always sad. Glad that fad didn't last long at all.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Aren't those Intel Compute Stick based on 32 bit atoms? Will they lose support?

People with either aged or garbaged Systems (like recent x86 Atoms)

Intel BayTrail is x86_64, you just need one file (Item 1) and available Internet connection to get Linux installed.

[ResponseWriter]

People tend to install 32bit OS on low mem machines also, so something just being 64bit capable does not really help everytime in practice

I guess those netbooks are maybe tipically with 1GB RAM (maybe even less ), where GPU even bite 256 out of it

He, he, let alone world at moment where hardware looks even worse on average, but even on steam 1/3 of people has 4GB RAM or lower... those all will cry if you drop them either 32bit OSs or even worse 32bit binaries

Mine is N270 with 1GB RAM (upgraded to 2GB) so 32-bit is the only option there.

Like it or not, a lot of new machines out there in the mainstream (i.e. 'price-conscious') end of the market start at 2GB and 32-bit does tend to use slightly less memory. Even the Raspberry Pi distros for Raspberry Pi 3 (64-bit CPU, 1GB) tend to be 32-bit for this reason (but projects like Arch Linux ARM compile their own packages).

[sireangelus]

honestly i would deprecate also <core2

[starshipeleven]

People are people, no difference... they say what they use and that is it.

Microsoft released WIndows 10 32bit AFAIR because they said something like 30 million users still wants it... percentage is not different for Linux too i think, if we claim that we have 2% of market... basically that still means and it is quite possible how 600K Linux users care about 32bit OS . And why? Because people are the same, have same x86 hardware here and there - so the same possiblity...

Most common usecase for Windows 32bit in modern devices is for tablets, not exactly the most linux-friendly devices, heh?

[dungeon]

Mine is N270 with 1GB RAM (upgraded to 2GB) so 32-bit is the only option there.

Like it or not, a lot of new machines out there in the mainstream (i.e. 'price-conscious') end of the market start at 2GB and 32-bit does tend to use slightly less memory. Even the Raspberry Pi distros for Raspberry Pi 3 (64-bit CPU, 1GB) tend to be 32-bit for this reason (but projects like Arch Linux ARM compile their own packages).

I fully understand that... i even imagine 3 full football 100K capacity stadiums go mad if Ubuntu/Debian wanna drop x86 32bit OS now

I don't think we in Debian would even consider that in release or two, maybe after three

[GreatEmerald]

Great news. It's about time. Indeed, from my experience (Z670 in a tablet) the Atom CPUs are not really capable of running much of anything any more. (Not to mention Poulsbo drivers, that even on Windows cannot run even 480p videos!)

There are still enough machines out there doing a fine job "even" with a "lowly" 32bit x86 CPU. Automates, embedded systems, machines in private households, boxes driving expensive measurement devices in laboratories... It's good that there are still some who will support it.

And that is great. I'm using Gentoo myself, and it would be a sad day if they dropped i686 support. But that's the thing. Devices that are truly 32-bit *should* be running Gentoo and nothing else; if programs are not optimised for their particular CPUs, they will be too slow to use. So everyone should drop i686 support except for Gentoo because that's the only distribution that still makes it work.

Atoms in netbooks had a bullshit GPU, the OEM rarely assigned more than 8 MiB to it, in my netbook it was configurable and max was 64 MiB.

That fun "let's assign random ridiculous amounts of MB to the iGPU for no fucking reason" happens on laptops with AMD APUs that have half-decent iGPU.
Like my current "netbook" with an E1-1200, that wastes 512MiB of RAM for the GPU for lulz and I can't change it. On a board with 4GiB of soldered RAM.

True. My netbook (AMD C-60, so it's 64-bit capable) actually has around 720 MiB RAM available for programs, because it has 1 GiB total, 256 MiB reserved for the iGPU and the rest for other stuff (kernel, UEFI, etc.). Which is why I'm actually using Gentoo on it, with x32 architecture. That's pretty much the target hardware for x32, as it really helps conserve RAM and makes everything faster due to less swapping, and also making use of the 64-bit registers (which GCC happily optimises for). So unlike my tablet mentioned before, the netbook is actually very good at doing much of everything, even light gaming (DOOM!) and I often use it as my primary system while travelling.

[bibaheu]

I use a Dell Latitude C400 as my home server (pretty much ssh and some torrenting). It's a 2001 laptop with a Pentium 3 Mobile at 866Mhz and 1GB of RAM. It runs surprisingly fast for what it does, and it's silent and quiet (fan is off most of the time)... but it's completely unusable for desktop usage: anything more than links will crash at some moment due to the browser trying to use SSE.

I guess I'll have to move away from Arch, and install Debian. That means my only contribution to AUR won't be useful anymore: it's a bootloader that adds CD boot support to machines like this.