On Friday 28 of August 2015 03:16:41 Felix Miata wrote:
Michal Kubecek composed on 2015-08-28 08:48 (UTC+0200):
I'm afraid discontinuing i586 would be something I would call acknowledging the state of things and stopping pretending rather than some big and groundbreaking step.
Last I checked every distrowatch listing above openSUSE still provided a 32 bit version, and IIRC, it was necessary to drop below the top 10 to find one that didn't. Fedora still calls its 386.
(Question of distrowatch listing order relevance aside.) Well, this doesn't actually contradict what I said. I have little reason to believe their level of actual support is much different from ours.
I remember seeing plenty of threads around where this sort of topic has come up, and seeing lots of people still using 32 bit by preference on their 64 bit systems.
That's exactly what I suspected: most people using 32-bit distributions these days actually do so because of their beliefs, not because they have to. Such use is certainly legitimate - but way less relevant for the question whether we should support the architecture.
It seems to me any acknowledgement would primarily be that the majority of developers don't want to bother with less than the newest and fastest machines,
Newest and fastest? 64-bit CPU's are widely available since ~2003 and prevailing since ~2005, for last 5 years, it's almost impossible to buy a 32-bit one. And again, it's not about "fastest". The tricks kernel has to do to cope with 32-bit architecture are quite ugly. There are even problems that can't be resolved on i586 (I remember a guy having over 60% of his 2GB RAM unused but unable to add a netfilter rule because of memory allocation failure). You have fewer registers, leading to much less efficient function calling convention etc.
largely I'll bet to compensate for software bloat, driving the cycle that makes vendors happy, but not so much users, particularly those on tight budgets.
Seriously?
It won't surprise me if whichever top 10 distro first dumps 32 bit falls at least 2 spots in short order, unless several do it in short order.
Pure speculation (or even wishful thinking). I could say once someone dares to do it, several others will follow - and it would be about as much fact based as your claim (i.e. not at all). Michal Kubeček -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org