Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds

[starshipeleven]

Spins are not equally supported. Show me a spin that has wayland support.

That's a DE issue, actually. It's not like there are other distros where XFCE or MATE run at all on Wayland.

[Vistaus]

Raspi doesn't do x86, so it wouldn't work as you suggest. It is admittedly becoming a niche use case, but yes there is plenty of embedded 32 bit x86 out there. Most bank ATM machines are still in 2017 mainly 32 bit x86 running Windows XP. Same with a lot of the industrial, manufacturing, automation, etc.

Maybe in the States, but most bank ATM machines over here are still running on OS/2. Windows CE is only used for non-bank ATM's here. But ATM's are becoming obsolete anyway. They're removing more and more ATM's over here and in most parts of the world, the same will apply eventually as more and more people are using their debit card, credit card, PayPal, etc., etc. to pay for stuff rather than cash money.

[dungeon]

There are more Windows XP 32 bit users in the world than MacOS and Linux distros users all together

Microsoft hit equal amount of 32bit users to 64bit somewhare back at the end of a year 2010. and that just with Windows 7 actually. Before Vista was like nearly 90% 32bit and Window XP userbase even 99% 32bit. Now people think Linux is prodiminately 64bit, with better percentage ratio to Windows, blah blah... but that is actually not true as Linux actually hit equal spot 2 years later in 2012. Today i am sure there are at least half a million of 32bit Linux users if not even more, among which say 100K uses Fedora

Ideal time for architecture drop or even consideration of it, is when it stops going down anymore, that must also be something at bellow 5% but also consistently, etc... Otherwise you are ready or at least gambling to lost some userbase and you will of course have these heated discussions

[DebianXFCE Jr]

Spins are not equally supported. Show me a spin that has wayland support.

Are you assuming wayland being production ready? Just because it starts by default doesn't mean the work is done.

[FuturePilot]

Good riddance 32bit. It's time to go. I'm all for this. More distros should take this stance as well. Yeah there's some old hardware out there that people want to keep running, but most if not all of those systems are extremely underpowered these days for modern software especially browsers. I tried to run a lightweight setup on an old Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM and it was so slow it was unusable. It's time to let these systems go. They're pretty much unusable for any kind of desktop use.

[GI_Jack]

The computer *industry* prefers we throw old hardware on the scrap-pile, so its employees will not be paid any more to maintain 32-bit kernels. There's an ever-widening niche for an operating system that would keep old hardware useful and so avoid having to pay for new hardware to be produced, and shipped (and the many costs of disposing of the old).

Most old hardware is obsolete:

[QUOTE=stevenc;n962497
So what are good options to make use of:

686-class EeePC with 1GB RAM (still available to buy used)
AMD Geode 586+CMOV (686-compatible) (available in bulk, pre-owned)
486-class embedded systems (still produced today)
Athlon K7 desktops?
Intel Pentium-4 PCs?
Intel Celeron(P6/Netburst) laptops?
Intel Pentium-III servers?

OpenBSD comes to mind. I think Debian cannot run XFCE+Firefox with less than 1GB RAM nowadays.[/QUOTE]

The only thing they are going to be good at is running legacy applications developed when they were supported, and in closed loop systems with specific applications designed for them. Laptops, Desktops, and Servers are more valuable recycled for the gold on the chips.

For the AMD Geode 586 is probably the only useful thing on that list. My suggestion is to continue running old versions of software as well. If you are OK with using a chip from 2005, running software from 2005 should be acceptable as well. If you are running a closed loop embedded program, it shouldn't be an issue. Run it until it dies.

As far as Pentium 3 servers, I hope you jest. Servers consume a lot of power. There is always better power/performance trade off on new machines. You are wasting electricity by running it.

Also consider this, they are dumping sooo many Dell Poweredge 2950/1950s on the market. These are 64-bit Xeon machines from 5 years ago, and R6x0 series poweredges sa well. If you want to dig through corporate trash, these machines are actually useful.

[GI_Jack]

yes there is plenty of embedded 32 bit x86 out there. Most bank ATM machines are still in 2017 mainly 32 bit x86 running Windows XP. Same with a lot of the industrial, manufacturing, automation, etc.

There is nothing running the latest version of fedora that is 32-bit. Industrial/embedded are all closed loop software still running software from when they were new. They don't get upgrades, so it really does not matter new versions of software do not support old hardware.

[grok]

Good riddance 32bit. It's time to go. I'm all for this. More distros should take this stance as well. Yeah there's some old hardware out there that people want to keep running, but most if not all of those systems are extremely underpowered these days for modern software especially browsers. I tried to run a lightweight setup on an old Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM and it was so slow it was unusable. It's time to let these systems go. They're pretty much unusable for any kind of desktop use.

I don't understand this. Some are recommending an rapsberry pi, which only has 1GB RAM and cannot swap (it uses SD). Netbook with 1GB RAM + swapping on HDD will be better regarding amount of RAM + swap.

It was so slow? Well, stop trying to do everything with a web browser perhaps? Or you had a graphics driver that doesn't work properly so you should try vesa driver instead. Also, easier to use a recent mainstream distro to sort things out and LXDE is rather "full featured" compared to icewm, fluxbox etc. while filling the low RAM low CPU niche.

About buying a Raspberry Pi : add the SD card, HDMI monitor, USB keyboard, USB mouse. Or specialist hardware like HDMI-to-VGA

[starshipeleven]

I don't understand this. Some are recommending an rapsberry pi, which only has 1GB RAM and cannot swap (it uses SD). Netbook with 1GB RAM + swapping on HDD will be better regarding amount of RAM + swap.

Fun fact, first and second gen notebooks run worse than last gen raspi, and even others don't fare much better. Atom processors stopped being total mind-boggling shit well after that, and latest raspi has a relatively decent ARM quadcore with NEON (media acceleration instructions).

Also, nothing stops people from using swap on sdcards, on modern and fast SDcards it's much better than swapping on HDD, as flash is still significantly faster on small writes. It helps keep the system more stable if you want to use heavier programs like a web browser.

Well, stop trying to do everything with a web browser perhaps?

Ahem. Netbooks were basically a crappier and Windows version of modern Chromebooks. Their main purpose was running a browser, and some text editors.
And yes, they were very barely capable of running a browser even back then.

Or you had a graphics driver that doesn't work properly so you should try vesa driver instead

VESA is heavy on CPU as it is CPU rendering. Not a good idea on Atoms.

[grok]

Points taken, perhaps you need a really good SD card though that's even like an SSD-lite internally. I still look at them like they write or delete in 128KiB or perhaps bigger blocks and most/many are slow even on sequential writes (class 10 means 10MB/s ; typically 8GB cards don't qualify for that). Sounds like I could be willing to do that if a flash-aware kernel deals with the swap partition with that in mind, or if a swap file on a flash-aware file system (f2fs) does.

Or if you constrain yourself enough you can do with no swap. music player, terminals, pcmanfm and a handful firefox tabs at most.
I also suggest doing an ssh -X to a better PC if you want to do unconstrained browsing (but not so much "multimedia") from a really weak system. netbook with broken screen can also useful as a "desktop" in that way (add peripherals)

Pcmanfm is a really great piece of software, it's like 90% of what makes LXDE and it has very low dependencies and can easily be used anywhere as well. I wish to end on a positive note. You can realistically run it on Pentium II 233 or Rapberry 1 with 128MB RAM and there's some popularity of lubuntu on powerful/normal 64bit systems as well.

VESA is heavy on CPU as it is CPU rendering. Not a good idea on Atoms.

True but when things are completely dire you're left with super slow graphics even on the supposedly proper driver, it's also my understanding that modern things like browsers are unaccelerated anyway. OpenGL "acceleration" would even be the worst case if it happened to work for whatever thing.