Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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

[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?