Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support

[Delgarde]

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

Yes, well... Debian has always had a fairly conservative user base. Bleeding-edge distros like Arch can get away with dropping support for old software and hardware a lot more easily than Debian can...

[dungeon]

Yes, well... Debian has always had a fairly conservative user base.

It is not conservative but pure statistic driven, popcon says 28% of people has 32bit kernel installed for Debian 7, while for Debian 8 that is 18% and we will see how it will be for 9 and up.

You see how percentage goes up, when we don't look just at modern upstream and gaming driven statistic only

It normaly goes down but percentage is still quite high, it is still second most used architecture, so no way we will drop that If bellow 5% maybe we can say OK, but it is still nowhere there

[starshipeleven]

I guess I'll have to move away from Arch, and install Debian.

Considering its usage, you might want to look at LEDE/OpenWRT too, there are builds for i486 and i686 too afaik.

[geearf]

I am not sure why users here are excited about this, especially since the other considered option was to keep i686 alive and to raise the requirements of x64 to be able to have better compiler optimisations (somewhat similar to Clear I guess). This is of course a great move for the devs, but for the rest of us I don't know.

[Vistaus]

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!

Lolwut? Since when are automates and laboratories and stuff running a rolling release bleeding-edge distro like Arch? That sounds like a giant risk. If anything breaks due to being bleeding edge, then they will suffer the consequences when irl they need rock stable machines. And a lot of embedded systems are moving to ARM, so 32-bit is deprecating itself there.

[Vistaus]

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...

But people using really old 32-bit hardware are probably not using Arch anyway but rather something even more lightweight like Tiny Core Linux or AntiX.

[Vistaus]

honestly i would deprecate also <core2

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't support for specific CPU's a Linux task rather than an Arch Linux task?

[Vistaus]

Considering its usage, you might want to look at LEDE/OpenWRT too, there are builds for i486 and i686 too afaik.

Or Tiny Core Linux or AntiX.

[chithanh]

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

They have 32 bit UEFI (at least some of them), but the CPUs are 64-bit.
This used to be a problem on Linux, and still is on Windows. But modern 64-bit Linux distros should work fine.

The only major group of 32-bit Atoms still in use are the netbooks with Atom N270 CPU.

[franglais125]

It is not conservative but pure statistic driven, popcon says 28% of people has 32bit kernel installed for Debian 7, while for Debian 8 that is 18% and we will see how it will be for 9 and up.

Just curious, how do you get these figures? Just browsing on qa.debian I couldn't find a breakdown by architecture.

Cheers