Manjaro Linux To Drop 32-bit Support

[starshipeleven]

Congratulations sdack. This has to be the most obnoxious 'in defence of the venerable cruft' I have ever witnessed. 8-|

To be fair, there were many strong contenders for that title in this thread.

[Bucic]

Congratulations sdack. This has to be the most obnoxious 'in defence of the venerable cruft' I have ever witnessed. 8-|

[Weasel]

You didn't provide any logical, practical reason why keeping 32-bit on a PC system is required. I don't respect irrational beliefs, especially on the Internet.

It uses less memory / disk space especially if you have to run 32-bit apps (multilib is cool but you'd need more resources to use it on a 64-bit system). Pretty important for some use cases. For example, one of them is VMs. It might shock you, but VMs need an OS to work as well, so the OS has to be available. 64-bit in a lightweight VM is total redundancy, I'd say lunacy, but I know most people think with fashion sense more than with rationality.

Thus for lightweight VMs 32-bit makes far more sense, especially if you want to run 32-bit apps in them (not requiring multilib). Not all use-cases of OS isos are done on real hardware.

When you don't even need 4GB of RAM it's pathetic to waste 4 extra bytes on every pointer, total redundancy, that's what I call irrational. You asked for a rational reason. There's nothing rational about being a purist and redundant calculations, which is what 64-bit is to everyone who is comfortable with 32-bit on a specific system (not all systems, people can use both, if given the choice).

"But more registers" nobody mentioned anything about performance, but about memory/disk USAGE. Plus, more memory (redundant pointers, again, in 64-bit, 100% overhead for them) means less cache utilization, there's a reason you sometimes see benchmarks where 64-bit is *slower* at some tasks that aren't computing intensive. Deal with it.

I know you won't want to believe that other people just live life and use computers differently than your "fashion statement purist" user, but you asked for rational reason, and I gave it.

What rational reason is there to use 64-bit on a system with less than 4GB RAM? (or a lightweight VM with less than 4GB RAM)
More registers? What if I don't care about computing-intensive tasks, or what if it's actually *slower* due to worse cache usage?

Not only more RAM use/disk space usage, but can also be slower, redundancy is never rational.

[kon14]

Except that these machines are still commonplace in much of the world. Of course, you can sit in your affluent white privilege home and look down your nose at people who can't afford your 64 bit lifestyle. But classrooms across Africa depend on 32 bit x86 hardware. Do you hate all black people? Or just black children who are trying to learn computers? Folks, we can thank Obama for perpetuating this kind of arrogance and hate, while calling it "progress".

I guess you clicked the wrong tumblr bookmark? I swear you can't be anywhere online today without some delusional self hating while feminist sjw dude trying to guilt trip people, in a completely irrelevant conversation, into hating themselves and the white race.

Nobody ever suggested that 32bit x86 be wiped off the surface of our history and it's not going to be deprecated in kernel or important system software any time soon.
People in Africa are most likely not using Manjaro and if they do and can't keep up with technology after decades they should just go ahead and install a legacy distro like everyone else around the world. Besides, most of them are probably not using x86 at all, especially after the raspberry pi and other extremely affordable arm boards came to be.

Nobody is discriminating on anyone, intentionally or not, but you and your kind.
You're the ones that have to squeeze hatred out of everything and won't let people live happily ever after forcing them to hate each other eternally, so just take your off-topic bullshit and shove it up your sorry self.

[torsionbar28]

Listen, 32-bit hardware on PC is pretty much obsolete bullshit, or stuff that should have never been made (old-gen Atom processors I'm looking at you).

We are talking of first-gen Core processors and older, or crappy netbooks. That hardware is already plagued by crappy processors, usually 2GB max ram and crappy integrated GPU too, obsolete expansion interfaces and so on and so forth.

Except that these machines are still commonplace in much of the world. Of course, you can sit in your affluent white privilege home and look down your nose at people who can't afford your 64 bit lifestyle. But classrooms across Africa depend on 32 bit x86 hardware. Do you hate all black people? Or just black children who are trying to learn computers? Folks, we can thank Obama for perpetuating this kind of arrogance and hate, while calling it "progress".

[trek]

When are some people going to accept that 32-bit is dying/dead, and it WILL disappear soon. Why not get ahead of the curve (which we're already behind on anyway), and just get with the times?? It is going to happen; why not just accept it and embrace it?

to save the environment? the pollution generated to produce a new computer and the waste disposal of the old one is quite big, so if you delay the purchase of a new computer, you delay the destruction of the planet Earth

even if new hardware consumes less energy, the amount of energy needed to produce a computer is ~5 times more than the electricity consumed during its entire lifespan: https://books.google.it/books?id=FLKvBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT236

[kon14]

As Arch 32bit "disappears" there's 32bit community iso from day one. It's what I expected and is a very decent arrangement, don't have i686 iso QA and validation block the main project. I'll like if i686 stays "dead" in that way. I guess we might see something similar with Ubuntu - 18.10 drops i686 but I think we'll live to see unofficial Ubuntu 20.04 iso for i686.
You can find even Ubuntu Mate for PowerPC Mac, even though that's been "dead" for a while. If I get an iMac G5 that what it'll see without even booting even once in the deprecated Apple OS.

I bet you won't find as many people eager to continue doing this after distro's upstream actually stops building 32bit packages for these guys to use in these isos.
Dropping 32bit images has nothing to do with dropping 32bit altogether (which won't happen any time soon anyway) or only providing basic 32bit mulilib deps ofc.
They could build them themselves, but people in lesser distros would be less willing to do it for even less people.

[starshipeleven]

I have a deprecated DX11 GPU on my 64bit CPU, 64bit linux PC. With 64bit graphics memory. I can't dream of 3D graphics in Virtualbox. It's also an awesome oxymoron, deprecated DX11 GPU.

No wait a sec, how can it be a DX11 GPU deprecated on Linux?

I'm a dumb old fuck I guess, if some HTML5 thing is slow as fuck I blame it or I blame myself for running it, or I will find workarounds e.g. if I somehow need smooth youtube vids on slower than Atom I know I can achieve it with the right software. $50 phones and what not are not the only things that achieve it.

If I somehow spend 100% CPU power reading internet music on a PC dedicated to music playback I can deal with it (it happened, streaming things like deezer and soundcloud and youtube on a Pentium 3). This was when Flash was still needed and didn't require SSE2. I'm trained to fight and avoid swap hell. So five seconds of GUI lag while there are megabytes of free RAM and no sound frames are dropped don't scare me.

Heh, that's fine. As long as you recognize that most people just don't see the point of babysitting a PC or waiting 5 seconds between clicks when with a 50$ rig they can get everything running smoothly

[starshipeleven]

It's sadly not edge cases, but it's small businesses who suffer from it the most.

FYI: I'm in IT and the company I work with does IT support for small businness.

Can confirm that none is impacted by some PC-oriented linux distros switching off 32-bit support. Pretty much all 32-bit-only systems still run XP, and they won't be upgraded, period.

We've seen this with Microsoft beginning with Windows (where companies got stuck on MS/DOS) and it's happening with Linux, too,

FYI: normal companies refresh their hardware fleet every 5-10 years just because they need a new Windows version and can't be arsed to migrate their hardware

When you then see companies who have switched to Linux, but then are stuck on old distros with Firefox 11, which fails to open every second website (while the latest version currently is at 55) and thus regret their switch to Linux, perhaps then you'd begin to understand.

Would be interesting to know why they are stuck at FF11 to begin with.

The NHS would be safer if they ran Linux, but at the pace they are capable of maintaining and spending money on IT (instead of spending it on medical equipment and salaries), would they only be looking at another massive problem.

Hahahaha no. There the issue is that the IT management are idiots, not that they don't have money or whatever. Even with linux thry would manage to do stupid shit (see the FF11 issue you talked about above).

I'm wasting my time here when I'm explaining the problems others have with the IT industry.

You only provided examples of bad IT management, which is the main issue in the IT industry.

[sdack]

There's a perhaps small use case for bleeding edge distro on old PC, e.g. ...

It's sadly not edge cases, but it's small businesses who suffer from it the most. It's because the IT industry moves faster than most other industries. IT geeks who don't get much into contact with other industries don't see it, and so they cannot understand it. Hence the trolling here, but whenever the IT industry makes large steps does it force huge costs onto others. They either have to go along with it or risk having to pay not only for the upgrades, but for the damages caused by old bugs and security holes.

In the IT industry is the latest software already outdated on the day of its release. For many does "stable" equal "old", and yet is what is being considered as old and outdate by IT people the current and latest standard for others. We've seen this with Microsoft beginning with Windows (where companies got stuck on MS/DOS) and it's happening with Linux, too, and unless project leaders are aware of it, which of course not many are, is this even worse than with closed source. At least with closed source is profit a driving factor and when you cannot sell your software then you start looking for why this is. But open source moves forward as bold as possible. When you then see companies who have switched to Linux, but then are stuck on old distros with Firefox 11, which fails to open every second website (while the latest version currently is at 55) and thus regret their switch to Linux, perhaps then you'd begin to understand. Or take the WannaCry attack, which hit the NHS here in Britain quite hard, because they're mostly stuck on Windows XP and old hardware. The NHS would be safer if they ran Linux, but at the pace they are capable of maintaining and spending money on IT (instead of spending it on medical equipment and salaries), would they only be looking at another massive problem.

I'm sure starshipeleven will troll over such issues as only he can (because he doesn't have such issues *lol*) and while it's funny to see him do it do I feel I'm wasting my time here when I'm explaining the problems others have with the IT industry.