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.
(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.