A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

[Cyber Killer]

About my comment from the 1st page:
1. I don't use Fedora myself, but when 1 distro talks about dropping support for something, then many will follow in the near future, that probably won't leave too many distros to choose from for the older machines
2. there's more to an OS than just a web browser so staying on the last 32bit version is not an option
3. buying a new machine even for 60$ is a lot (not to mention just getting the cheapest replacement hardware as in cpu+mobo+ram in my country costs at least 100$ not 60$) when most people where I live earn around 400$/month with over half of that spent on monthly bills (greetings from "central" europe - where people get paid like in the east but everything costs like in the west :-/ ). To counter that in power bills would take at least a decade.
4. the atom cpu in my netbook (N2xx) was produced in 2008, so it's not true that intel hasn't been making 32bit cpus since 2003. Also it turns out it's not that old ;-).

All in all, like I said I'm for deprecating 32bit software, but it should still be available for at least another 5 years. Maybe we'll see most of the 32bit hardware dead by that time so dropping it won't affect as many people..

[The Walking Glitch]

Holy shit the ignorance in this thread is astounding. Consider me the resident computer hardware expert from now on. There were many Pentium 4 systems with 4 DDR slots, which means they can use 4GB of RAM with an OS that supports PAE. I have a 500Mhz Powermac G4 with 1.25GB of RAM that other than being really slow works fine as a daily driver with OS X Tiger. It would also work fine on Linux if I bothered to spend hours and hours setting Debian up; MintPPC did all of the hard work for you, but the author won't be spinning a new version himself in the near future, and it really needs it.

It's really difficult to find good old (REALLY OLD) i686 computers, which means old Pentium or Athlon(without -64 suffix) computers.
I don't think such a system will have sufficient memory to run modern desktop distro smoothly.

I would definitively use CentOS 5 rather than Fedora on such systems.

[NotMine999]

Underestimating Price

For $60+/-$5 you would be able to replace the desktop systems with a low end and low power APU system that would be faster in all respects and use far less power and produce far less heat.

As to your old netbook, theres always Puppy.

Very little of an old P4 system is reuseable. The peripherals...probably, but not many mainboards built today still have floppy & IDE connectors. DRAM from an old P4 is most likely unuseable on a new mainboard. So that leaves anything that's SATA or external USB to be easily transferred to new hardware.

Some of the cheepest PC packages that I have seen in "advertised sales" run around $200 USD. The CPU is most likely a low-end AMD APU model or Intel BayTrail-based Celeron.

You could "go cheeper" and get an ECS LIVA-X for around $150-$200 USD, maybe less, but it lacks "expandability" and lots of connectors that many might find "useful to have".

All of these options can run x86-64 code and have a decent amount of memory. ECS LIVA-X has 2G or 4G of DDR3L, mSATA, and 32G or 64G of eMMC, so it could even run Windows 7 via mSATA.

Tablets might be even cheeper, but you might not have a "Linux option" for them; they could be "Android only" type hardware or "difficult to hack" platforms.

[Modu]

About Using Pentium 4's

Even in idle state a P4 PC with a 250W ATX PSU would consume much more power than a NUC with a Baytrail CPU and a 36W power brick. For those who claims P4s are still good I don't think it's feasible to use that old machines theese days (calculations are welcome).

[AJSB]

But can afford to pay for old system power consumption? How is that possible?

Well that is perfectly possible:

Taking in account amount of hardware that would need to be replaced and its cost, you do the math as for how many hours per day PC works, how many days per year, how much energy saved per hour...then you realize that you only gonna recover the investment after X or even XX number of years and by that by time, "new" PC needs to be replaced, so you gained nothing...assuming that "new" PC doesn't breaks and needs repair, in witch case you actually loose more than stay still.

Example
I have two "old" CRTs, that even if we don't consider the amazing image quality they have compared with LCDs, the energy saved by going LCD-LED taking in account life span of LCD-LED and their cost, doesn't compensate AT ALL replace them.

[Adarion]

Such a distro will exist anyway, Fedora's decision has nothing to do with it. Well, at least for a short time. Those running x86 should bloody get to their heads they're running on a dead architecture that's on extended zombie mode.

Then please tell the software developers to switch to amd64 and please port all their older software to use 64bit libs!

I have both working 32bit HW (Athlon XP, Geode LX, C7, C3-2, Transmeta and others) and I do have a bunch of amd64 systems in daily use (Athlon 5350 aka Kabini, E-350 and Athlon II X4 645 and predecessors). And I am grateful that AMD made their architectures backward compatible.
Yes, it kind of sucks that one still has to deal with 32bit libs on a native 64bit system but that is due to all the tons of legacy software that will hardly ever get updated. I am not using Fedora or RH but I guess a user would look surprised if all 32bit compat. was killed off suddenly. Blob drivers for external printers, scanners and so on would stop working. I have seen those. 90% of games would stop working. WINE would likely stop working. Some emulator would cease to do their job. Other Linux-native blob software would go bellyup.
Form that point of view you would obsolete a good bunch of HW and even more SW. And I count it for a strength of Linux that it does support older stuff, also. I am not sure if RH would really lose much development force if they still cared for other arches than amd64.

Well, if RH/Fedora still wants to go that step, it's their decision. I am just uncertain if that would be wise.

[Adarion]

On the energy consumption discussion.

It is always a matter to see the whole thing.
If you have a device (car, CPU, whatever) that is 5 years old and uses 10 units of energy per month (electric, fuel, ...) and compare it to a device made 2014 which uses, say, 8 units of energy. Then you must check the overall amount of energy and waste that was produced/used to make the whole thing. (Just) 2 units difference might seem better but if the production of the device used 5000 anyway this is not so much and you would need to run the new device for a very long time to get the difference in. If the difference was more like 10 to 0.1 the new thing seems much more justified.

E.g. my old car is 23 years. Still, when I drive with care, it uses just maybe 1,5 liters more than efficient (!) cars today and does the same job for me. So it is still good.
Of course if you use the old P4 heating plate to compare it with an Atom or Kabini it is different. I don't have solid numbers for what CPU production produces in waste but in this case, the often outstandingly unefficient P4 series is likely better to be exchanged by something else. Still, changing from P4 to anything else would obsolete mainboard, RAM and possibly a few other components. If it was a laptop then even more things go to waste which is one point why I avoid relying on laptops.
If you already run a power efficient system and it does the job for you then a change would not be indicated right now.

[AJSB]

Even in idle state a P4 PC with a 250W ATX PSU would consume much more power than a NUC with a Baytrail CPU and a 36W power brick. For those who claims P4s are still good I don't think it's feasible to use that old machines theese days (calculations are welcome).

NUC, ZBOX, BRIX and MiniPC are many times total garbage...i.e.:

Can i fit inside a 6TB 3.5" HDD ? or two 2TB 2.5" HDD ? or a ODD ? or any mix of previous examples ?

Do they have legacy Parallel or Serial ports (and please don't talk to me of USB adapters) for legacy hardware that might be non-replaceable or costs a LOT to replace ?

Hell, do they even have enough USB connections for my hardware ?

Those things are nice to a certain crowd but they are extremely limited in all aspects.

[nanonyme]

About my comment from the 1st page:
1. I don't use Fedora myself, but when 1 distro talks about dropping support for something, then many will follow in the near future, that probably won't leave too many distros to choose from for the older machines
2. there's more to an OS than just a web browser so staying on the last 32bit version is not an option
3. buying a new machine even for 60$ is a lot (not to mention just getting the cheapest replacement hardware as in cpu+mobo+ram in my country costs at least 100$ not 60$) when most people where I live earn around 400$/month with over half of that spent on monthly bills (greetings from "central" europe - where people get paid like in the east but everything costs like in the west :-/ ). To counter that in power bills would take at least a decade.
4. the atom cpu in my netbook (N2xx) was produced in 2008, so it's not true that intel hasn't been making 32bit cpus since 2003. Also it turns out it's not that old ;-).

All in all, like I said I'm for deprecating 32bit software, but it should still be available for at least another 5 years. Maybe we'll see most of the 32bit hardware dead by that time so dropping it won't affect as many people..

Then please protest when the distro of your choice is making this decision. Demanding distros you don't use must support 32bit is rather self-centered.

[Nille]

Why only the Black and White thinking. I would abandon the 32bit Only installations and let run the 32bit Apps only as Multiarch. Comercial Software Ventors can modify there Software for 64bit in the next time. In 2 or 3 Years they can Drop the official 32bit Packages.