Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future

There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward.

The Debian release team decided that the Linux kernel, Debian Installer, and Debian image teams will "cease to support i386 in the near future."

Debian developer Paul Gevers shared from this Cambridge sprint:

A future for the i386 architecture
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Insofar as they still do, we anticipate that the kernel, d-i and images teams will cease to support i386 in the near future. Following that, there are two routes into running i386:

1. as a multi-arch option on an otherwise amd64 system
2. as an i386 chroot on another architecture system

We're not planning to make i386 a partial architecture in the way Ubuntu has, arch:any will still contain i386 so everything builds by default. Maintainers who wish to drop i386 support can do so *after* coordination with the reverse (build) dependencies of their package, as with dropping support for any other architecture. We also like to note that we have no opposition to changes to the baseline when these changes land (it's a port matter).

More details on the other items discussed by the Debian release team can be found via the mailing list. But considering other Linux distributions have been moving away from i386 for years and some Linux distributions even raising their x86-64 micro-architecture baselines, it's not too surprising to see Debian also finally moving more away from i386 especially ahead of Debian 13 releasing in roughly two years.