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: 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.