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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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(Score: 3, Interesting) by engblom on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:08PM
I guess this will annoy some Arch users. To fully remove 32-bit support sounds bad. For those needing to run Wine, how will this work out? Or those needing Skype? Or anyone needing to run any other program with dependencies on 32-bit libraries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:25PM
The multilib support stays (that is all the lib32-packages that provide 32bit libraries ready to run on a 64bit base system).
32bit intel packages are also not entirely out of the question: If volunteers step up and take the burden, the packages will stick around -- a bit outside of the official builds, but still very visible in Arch-Land. If nobody can be bothered to step up and take over building and testing the 32bit packages, then they deserve to die:-)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:01PM
32bit intel packages are also not entirely out of the question: If volunteers step up and take the burden, the packages will stick around
I wouldn't be so sure.
When Arch announced the switch to systemd, they said the same thing about volunteers stepping up and take over maintaining sysvinit. They then spent the next two weeks banning anyone who tried to volunteer from the Arch forums.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:42PM
I too am married to Wine and Skype for various reasons, one of them being that my clients prefer Skype over IRC because Skype is automatically logged durably and IRC is not. And Ubuntu is also sunsetting 32-bit support; by 18.10 [ubuntu.com], its repository won't even include the libraries to run 32-bit applications.
For Skype, use the web client. Or, equivalently, use the 64-bit alpha version that embeds Chromium and uses half a gigabyte of RAM. Or you could convince your contacts to stop using a proprietary chat application with a proprietary protocol in favor of a chat application supported by at least one free client. The ideal recommendation would depend on your use case for Skype: is it text, text with durable logs, audio, or video?
For Wine, here are a couple things to try that I myself haven't tried: One is to run a different 32-bit Linux distribution in a container and use your 64-bit X server on the outer machine to view the container. Another is to ask your application's publisher for a 64-bit build of the application and run it in 64-bit Wine.