Approved: Fedora 31 To Drop i686 Everything/Modular Repositories

[Hugh]

@cl33r: I use Fedora, by choice, on many desktops. It sure seems to be a desktop OS.

@Britoid: I use it professional contexts. I generally want current stuff. When I don't, I typically use CentOS. What am I doing wrong?

[Britoid]

Fedora is a server OS that pretends to be a desktop OS too.

Fedora is pretty good for personal server environments, but in any sort of professional context it's not a good choice as releases are only supported for a year.

Cockpit is amazing though.

[cl333r]

Fedora's pushing for everything to be in containers anyway with things like toolbox.

Fedora is a server OS that pretends to be a desktop OS too.

[birdie]

Disclaimer: According to some comments in the previous 32-bit drop thread, this change does not affect multilib, so Steam and DefleMask (and other 32-bit apps) will work fine.

Just to explain a little further: Fedora will no longer provide an option to install on i686-class hardware but i686 packages will still be available in x86_64 repositories. This is not what Ubuntu decided to do (have they already changed their minds?).

To be even more technical, they have decided not to build i686 packages in i686 build roots which are being deprecated. One possible caveat is that Fedora's i686 packages are not even pure Intel Pentium Pro binaries - they probably require newer CPUs/instructions ;-)

I have no objections to that. If you have the said very old hardware you'll probably want to use an older, more lightweight distro, e.g. CentOS 6.

[Calinou]

EDIT: That's why I stopped using nodejs from modular repositories and I installed the official snap package. Even though snaps have some issues, they are truly modular (and now they also provide multiple versions installable in parallel).

That reminds me, fnm is also worth a look to manage multiple Node.js versions

Unlike nvm, it doesn't slow down the shell startup, making it more usable as a daily driver.

[Azrael5]

Good choice, I agree.

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

I've disabled the modular repos for good. If or when I want to have the modular-whatever-fancy-new-and-shiny experience I'll opt for Fedora Silverblue - but that's by far not where I need it to be in terms of comfort/ease of use/meeting my habits, yet.

[Britoid]

Modular concept in Fedora is just broken. I had installed latest sway from modular repositories and this made steam (from rpmfusion) uninstallable as the sway module depended on some newer library from modular repositories and didn't provide the equivalent 32bit library at the same version which steam needed. Then I did a little research and I found many cases that modular packages break normal packages (not only from rpmfusion, but from official repos too) and I remember a maintainer had even said that he would step down if modular repositories don't stop providing their own versions of libraries which can break other packages... These shouldn't be called modular, unmodular would be a better name...

EDIT: That's why I stopped using nodejs from modular repositories and I installed the official snap package. Even though snaps have some issues, they are truly modular (and now they also provide multiple versions installable in parallel).

Fedora's pushing for everything to be in containers anyway with things like toolbox.

[ThanosApostolou]

Modular concept in Fedora is just broken. I had installed latest sway from modular repositories and this made steam (from rpmfusion) uninstallable as the sway module depended on some newer library from modular repositories and didn't provide the equivalent 32bit library at the same version which steam needed. Then I did a little research and I found many cases that modular packages break normal packages (not only from rpmfusion, but from official repos too) and I remember a maintainer had even said that he would step down if modular repositories don't stop providing their own versions of libraries which can break other packages... These shouldn't be called modular, unmodular would be a better name...

EDIT: That's why I stopped using nodejs from modular repositories and I installed the official snap package. Even though snaps have some issues, they are truly modular (and now they also provide multiple versions installable in parallel).

[Britoid]

I think given Fedora's target demographic (developers), the affected number of users percentage wise is probably super close to 0%.