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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: 3, Interesting) by Hyperturtle on Tuesday July 05 2016, @09:11PM
32 bit OSes on 32bit or 64 bit hardware... is good for just about anything server related that provides something straightforward, or even complex if done properly -- alerting, ftp, tftp, mail delivery for a small place or limited function, home control network management (16 bit would do for that...probably 8bit too but I think windows 3.1 and dos 6 or so is as far back in time as most people want to install on 32 bit hardware...but I can be mistaken! Even exchange 2007 has a 32 bit version. Yes older stuff may not be up to date, but older stuff often doesn't even HAVE the problems that need patching. If you do not run flash on it then you aren't going to get hit with flash problems. And if you don't use it to surf the web, you aren't going to expose it to that set of issues either.
If your needs are not requiring web enabled fancy java scripticiousness, then a lot of that older hardware never got old in the context that they were intended to be used in. They still do the job they were designed to do, and with some effort to modernize parts of them, they can do the job better than intended. Windows 2003 32 bit with a gigabit card, an SSD boot volume and some modern SATA drives (raid them or not doesnt matter) can act as a file share, network monitor etc, really really well. Better than most 2003 VMs, since most VM platforms seem to have a problem emulating the 2003 networking stack*. 2008 may be faster, but it might not be faster on your old hardware.
32 bit linux based firewalls are still very powerful. They never became otherwise. It's the *consumer* stuff that most people think 32 bit sucks at -- that it sucks at. That 3.4ghz PIV mentioned in the article is faster than the entire Cisco line of ASA 5500 series firewalls that most people would see -- the ASA 5510-5540 is all slower than that. There is special sauce in those, no doubt (integrated chips for encryption and such), but consider that the ASA 5505 is a 500mhz processor. You do not need a multicore i3 i5 i7 whatever to do this -- you don't even need a dual core CPU to do a lot of this. Some special purpose ISOs don't even support hyperthreading, let alone a true second core or physical processor.
The real hiccups are when people can't leave the hardware alone and try to make it do too much -- a linux firewall can be great, a linux firewall that plays videos and share files and surfs the web and hosts a web server for media selection... might disappoint. A 32 bit linux PC acting as a several purpose appliance won't. Even so, you can get a *lot* more life out of older hardware by improving them a bit--replace the old disk drive with a solid state storage device (CF, SD, SSD, etc) can rejuvenate old hardware.
It may take effort, but if you are willing to tinker, you can get a lot of utility out of older hardware. Replacing the disk drives, getting more ram etc. People argue sometimes that oh old stuff sucks a lot of power new stuff is so much better -- sometimes the people that say that are the same people that spend $200 on candles to save on electricity. Spending that electricity cost over time is of greater value to me than front loading the expense by buying new stuff, but its a valid argument if you don't have the old hardware to repurpose and don't want to find any.