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Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support

posted by FatPhil on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-the-world's-a-Cray dept.

"exec" writes in with this story from Phoronix

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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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:57PM

    by Arik (4543) on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:57PM (#458889) Journal
    "Offhand, I can't think of any 32bit x86 processor systems that you would actually want to put an entire Linux distro on. Maybe just a kernel and a very small subset of standard and/or custom software for embedded environments but not a full blown OS with all the trimmings. How about you lot?"

    Agree with you, only without the limitation to 32 bit processors, that's true of anything. The only reason to install 'the entire distro' is because you have more storage than you know how what to do with and you're short of time.

    Also I do have 32bit x86 hardware still running and doing its job admirably. An EeePC, running customized Slackware not Arch though.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:15PM (#458955)

    Not really, I've tried installing a 32bit browser along with all the stuff that goes along with it along side a 64bit browser in order to get software that was poorly programmed to work. Having a separate 32bit install is just a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get those components to play nice with each other.

    Plus, this is the 21st century, the 20gb you need for that, is usually not hard to come by unless you're dealing with a tiny SSD or ancient disk that's probably going to fail soon anyways. Even my laptop from 5 years ago had over 300gb of space on it.