Fedora Has Deferred Its Decision On Stopping Modular/Everything i686 Repositories

[dungeon]

And since you are involved with Debian, what is their position on 32 bit ISOs and packages...

Debian 10 have it fully working, for future nothing is decided project wise yet And if nothing is decided up until let say this time next year, then it will continue.

, there is a plan for supporting those until some specific year?

Maybe could be possible to prolongs it to year 2023. So one more release at best might be, but don't count on it.

Ultimately to year 2025. as even Microsoft plan EOL for Windows 10 at year 2025. you know, nothing lasts forever really

Since some people still uses long time unsupported Windows XP, it won't surprise me that Windows 7 users will too as there are huge amount currently worldwide, so Windows 10 too... so maybe you can expect some sort of wild west support for entire next decide

Embedded might reach even famous year 2038. you know

At that time super computers would need 128bit CPUs already, so we might talk about dropping 64bit you know

[Jaxad0127]

This is missing the bigger picture. It's not about 32-bit hardware, which has long been supplanted by 64-bit for all but a few special cases. It's about software compatibility.

Removing 32-bit library and loader support from the system is a compatibility break with all 32-bit software reliant upon these facilities. There's a lot of proprietary 32-bit-only code out there. 32-bit ELF binaries have been around, and supported, for well over two decades at this point. There's also a heck of a lot of free software built as 32-bit binaries which many people would like to continue to use.

Systems like Windows, despite all their inherent flaws, made backward compatibility a mantra. Old software had to run on new systems. It matters a great deal. Even today, you can run a 32-bit executable or DLL from the early 90s on today's 64-bit Windows 10. The same line of reasoning also makes retaining such support of high value for Linux, to allow continued use of perfectly functional code. Not all code is provided through distributions, and not all code has a current replacement. I don't think throwing it out because it presents a slight inconvenience is a convincing argument. Automatically building binaries for i386 is pretty cheap to retain, and as one of the people who wrote and maintained the autobuild infrastructure for Debian, which is or was also used by Ubuntu, I'm fully aware of the costs.

Who's talking about removing multilib? (other than Ubuntu)

Fedora is looking at removing packages needed to use x86 hardware, not software (on x86_64 hardware). At least that's how I'm reading everything.

[wizard69]

Honestly I see this as complete nonsense. First on environmental considerations alone we should be decommissioning ancient 32 bit hardware. You can easily be expending 10 times the energy to get the same level of performance. Second; the concept of getting with the program is still valid. Those that don’t want to play an have their dated solutions but I specifically chose Fedora for its somewhat bleeding edge nature. There are plenty of other lethargic distros out there, no need to turn Fedora in that direction

there are users of 8 bit systems that have given up on their old hardware or in some cases their emulators. That is fine and they can enjoy their niche. But demanding support in Linux for old 8 bit systems doesn’t make any more sense going forward than supporting 32 but hardware for the mainstream. 32 bit systems are now legacy hardware and as such we shouldn’t be saddling the future of Linux with them. .

Dropping 32 bit and 686 is a terrible idea and is the distros basically giving desktop users the big middle finger. I urge Ubuntu to start shipping full 32 bit images again and cancel all plans to eliminate 32 bit repos. I urge fedora to continue full support for i686. There are still a lot of perfectly find 32 bit machine around which can be used for instance by schools, libraries, outreach programs to engage people in computer programming and science for intance, all over the country. I do not like to see a lot of hardware wasted when we have a big e-waste problem so it makes use to put old computers to good use. A majoe market that linux needs to support is older computers such as 686, But it can also support the newest and fastest computers as well. I am not against new fast computers and I am for linux being used in data centers, But this does not mean we need to throw users of 32 bit machines under the bus.

I have long been a supporter of Linux for power users and for things like systemd to make linux workwell in data centers. But its not an either or thing. The OS can support both old hardware and new hardware. Im all for new hardware for people who can afford it. Its the people who want to drop old hardware support that are doing something harmful and trying to hurt people who use older hardware because I am all for supporting new hardware, but we also need to support old hardware.

[wizard69]

There is the mantra and then there is the reality, frankly MS Windows sucks as far as backwards compatibility goes. I know this personally from using various apps to support automation tooling. (In this case tools made of steel, not the common definition programmers use).

Beyond that the whole point of open source is that legacy software should never be a show stopper. If you have unsupported and less than free software to worry about then you have problems. Frankly I’m not concerned. It is the nature of software that some will get left behind! There are many reasons but the hard one is the developer kicking the bucket. So even with 32 bit software eventually the package dies without maintenance.

This is missing the bigger picture. It's not about 32-bit hardware, which has long been supplanted by 64-bit for all but a few special cases. It's about software compatibility.

Removing 32-bit library and loader support from the system is a compatibility break with all 32-bit software reliant upon these facilities. There's a lot of proprietary 32-bit-only code out there. 32-bit ELF binaries have been around, and supported, for well over two decades at this point. There's also a heck of a lot of free software built as 32-bit binaries which many people would like to continue to use.

Systems like Windows, despite all their inherent flaws, made backward compatibility a mantra. Old software had to run on new systems. It matters a great deal. Even today, you can run a 32-bit executable or DLL from the early 90s on today's 64-bit Windows 10. The same line of reasoning also makes retaining such support of high value for Linux, to allow continued use of perfectly functional code. Not all code is provided through distributions, and not all code has a current replacement. I don't think throwing it out because it presents a slight inconvenience is a convincing argument. Automatically building binaries for i386 is pretty cheap to retain, and as one of the people who wrote and maintained the autobuild infrastructure for Debian, which is or was also used by Ubuntu, I'm fully aware of the costs.

[MadeUpName]

You can keep running Fedora 30 on an ancient machine for as long as the machine keeps running. This isn't a subscription service. I imagine Fedora will still keep the existing repo trees available on line in case you need to grab some thing. If you are fine with 15 year old binaries I can't imagine why you would have a problem with a 6 month old Linux distro. I would rather see dev resources go to more important issues.

[dungeon]

First on environmental considerations alone we should be decommissioning ancient 32 bit hardware.

Considering that point alone, even first 64bit CPUs should de decommissioned... these are like 16 years old now too Because, you know, there are some 32bit only hardware newer than these

[Joe Braga]

Why is Distro's Communities annoying about it? Can Somebody explain me the reason why Microsoft continues offering System, System32 and SystemWOW64 for backward compatibility with 32-bit libraries and softwares that has been developed based on Win32 Library and compiled with C++ 32-bit compiler even it has dropped the avaibility of IWindows 10's 32-bit ISOs since last year?

[Jaxad0127]

Why is Distro's Communities annoying about it? Can Somebody explain me the reason why Microsoft continues offering System, System32 and SystemWOW64 for backward compatibility with 32-bit libraries and softwares that has been developed based on Win32 Library and compiled with C++ 32-bit compiler even it has dropped the avaibility of IWindows 10's 32-bit ISOs since last year?

Good question. I'm betting a lot of it is from people misunderstanding what exactly is being proposed: removing the ability to run 32bit native installs, not the ability to run 32bit software (except for the Ubuntu proposal, which was to remove both, AFAIK), exactly what MS has done, as you point out. From the looks of it, it'll be a long while before multilib can be deprecated.

[Joe Braga]

Good question. I'm betting a lot of it is from people misunderstanding what exactly is being proposed: removing the ability to run 32bit native installs, not the ability to run 32bit software (except for the Ubuntu proposal, which was to remove both, AFAIK), exactly what MS has done, as you point out. From the looks of it, it'll be a long while before multilib can be deprecated.

How is it, Multilib coulbe be deprecated?

[slacka]

First on environmental considerations alone we should be decommissioning ancient 32 bit hardware.

This is nonsense. Do you have the faintest idea the massive amount of energy required to produce a new laptop and ship it to you? I not only have solar on my roof, but my area is primary powered by renewable.. But even if my power was coal, I could keep my 25W Core Duo on for years and that would still add less CO2 to the atmosphere than a new machine would require to manufacture. And that's assuming the new laptop would actually draw that less power than my current one.

There are still plenty of good Core Duo laptops and Atom netbooks are 32-bit only. The world doesn't need more e-waste.

Oh, let's not forget that 64-bit pointers waste 10-30% of the RAM. So on machines with 4GB(which are still made today) and less, you are almost always better off with 32-bit OS... until the day that X32 ABI takes off.