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Arch Linux is moving ahead with preparing to deprecate i686 (x86 32-bit) support in their distribution.
Due to declining usage of Arch Linux i686, they will be phasing out official support for the architecture. Next month's ISO spin will be the last for offering a 32-bit Arch Linux install. Following that will be a nine month deprecation period where i686 packages will still see updates.
Any Soylentils still making major use of 32-bit x86? And any of you using Arch Linux? Distrowatch still lists Arch Linux as a top 10 distribution.
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Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:05PM
I don't know, I have mixed feelings.
Arch was always a "bleeding edge" OS. Essentially Gentoo for those who didn't want to bother compiling everything and didn't know how to use the Gentoo binary package system. So it does not surprise me that they would be the first do something like this. They figure their user base are the kind of people who run tricked out top end machines with the latest hardware.
However Arch may also be used when you want a small light distro on older hardware, or on embedded x86 systems. Something that takes minimal resources. People like that may be out of luck, but they can be catered to by some other OS which will still have i686 support.
From what I see, the embedded space is moving very much towards ARM, and the server/desktop has pretty much transitioned to 64bit, so that only leaves legacy/old hardware as needing 32-bit, which can be satisfied with other distros (or if it ever gets too hard, roll your own distro or use one of the BSDs).
So perhaps for Arch this is the right answer, not for me though as I still have a lot of 32bit machinery around doing useful stuff (Via EPIA boards for example, one of which runs Arch), but I accept that I am probably not their most common user, and it is probably not worth the community effort to keep an entire 32bit build chain and testing/patching/dev structure for a dying architecture.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:38PM
After discovering docker containers available with an Alpine linux spin to them, touted as having better default security and being tiny in size as it's advantage, I took at a look at this distro, and found it very much to my liking. This is coming from a long time Gentoo user (16 years now) where Gentoo is my preferred distro when running on bare metal, because of the control over what is, or more what is not, installed (recently, looking at you systemd).
Because it's built on musl libc and busybox, when they say small, it really is a small distro. So unless you have applications which require a traditionally built userland, I think Alpine could easily fill the gap left by Arch in terms of supporting older hardware or hardware with limited resources. I've been migrating all my Ubuntu/CentOS VMs in my lab over to Alpine recently, because it lets me cram more VMs on the same hardware, especially in terms of hard disk usage. And there appears to be ARM variants of it too as a bonus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:57PM
DSL, yellow dog, and Puppy Linux all come to mind. I don't expect them to drop any old architectures any time soon.
But, you've pretty much summarized my thoughts. Mixed feelings. I transitioned very early to 64 bit computing. I was impatient with progress every time I found it necessary to load 32 bit libraries. I purchased a Sledgehammer Opteron, and I wanted to use it as it was intended to be used.
On the other hand, I do have a bunch of old stuff lying around. I want it to keep on working until the electrons just can't flow through it anymore.
I suspect that I can do both, if I just research the distros a little.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:24PM
DSL is on shaky ground. The site has undergone a few blackout periods in the past few years and the latest stable version is from 2008 and the latest preview from 2012.
Doesn't mean its useless, I use it a lot on older systems for backups and disk imaging using DD.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 27 2017, @01:15AM
Wow. Time passes, and maybe I'm getting out of touch. Doesn't seem that long ago that I installed DSL to see how the (then) new release to see how it ran.