Ubuntu seems to be poising itself to letting 32-bitters alone in the dark:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2016-June/039420.html
in 2018, the question will come if we can effectively provide security support on i386.
cross-grading between i386->amd64 is not something we can reliably ship. We must continue [to] provide the i386 port, to support multiarch and 3rd party legacy application that are only available as i386 binaries.
Building i386 images is not "for free", it comes at the cost of utilizing our build farm, QA and validation time. Whilst we have scalable build-farms, i386 still requires all packages, autopackage tests, and ISOs to be revalidated across our infrastructure. As well as take up mirror space & bandwidth.
Thus the question is what can we and what should we do to limit i386 installations before they become unsupportable?
In essence this would mean April 2021 as the sunset for i386 as the host/base OS architecture. And April 2023 to run legacy i386applications with security support.
I do use, from time to time, a (then, in 2009) top-of-the-notch 3.4GHz P-IV, for the little gaming I do and for printing. But I did notice even it is easily overwhelmed by many javascript-laden sites. How many soylentils are going to fight tooth and nails to keep their 32 pc's up and running beyond 2018, are 32 bit platforms of any relevance today aside as for IoT or CNC processes?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 05 2016, @08:19PM
Are they dropping support for i386 or i686 as well? Debian dropped i386 support, but i686 [distrowatch.com] still works.
(Score: 4, Informative) by draconx on Tuesday July 05 2016, @08:53PM
When they say i386 they actually mean i686. If you're really, really lucky Ubuntu might even work on an actual Pentium Pro processor.
No modern distro runs on a 386 because the pthread implementation in the GNU C Library hasn't supported actual 386es for a long time.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday July 05 2016, @10:35PM
My question as well. That's a very confusing announcement. Are they dropping i386 or x86_32?...big difference.