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Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

pcworld.com

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Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#11

Post by ryanlol »

dhekir wrote: post #10

One thing that concerns me is packaging desktop virtual machine images for easy reproducibility. We realized that some users do not (or cannot, due to security policies) turn on VT-x/AMD-V in their machines, and therefore Virtualbox and VMWare Player cannot run 64-bit guests. So we had to make 32-bit virtual machine images for them. If popular distros stop supporting 32-bit, we will have a harder time packaging such…

This just means that you'll need to charge your customers more for supporting such obscure configurations.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#12

Post by StreakyCobra »

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this.

The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer libraries versions. This, plus the fact that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to vanilla upstream packages (i.e. less changes as possible), force them to be pragmatic about their choices. They prefer to embrace a change directly when it is happening, encouraging at the same time to contribute upstream for helping them make the transition, instead of trying to maintain a legacy compatibility that can only get worse with the time.

For me the picture is simple here: Arch is mostly used/oriented towards personal computers of power users, and most - if not all - of them are on 64 bit for years now. Instead of wasting efforts to maintain 32 bits compatibility, they prefer to drop it. Side effect will be that people will be encouraged to get a modern computer if not already.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#14

Post by ethagnawl »

ryanlol wrote: post #11
dhekir wrote: post #10

One thing that concerns me is packaging desktop virtual machine images for easy reproducibility. We realized that some users do not (or cannot, due to security policies) turn on VT-x/AMD-V in their machines, and therefore Virtualbox and VMWare Player cannot run 64-bit guests. So we had to make 32-bit virtual machine images for them. If popular distros stop supporting 32-bit, we will have a harder time packaging such…

This just means that you'll need to charge your customers more for supporting such obscure configurations.

It also means they'll have fewer customers running 32-bit builds.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#15

Post by stinkytaco »

creshal wrote: post #9
nebulon wrote: post #2

Will be interesting if a part of the community "forks" arch like they did for 16bit back then. However lowarch is apparently also dead by now: http://www.lowarch.org/ I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.

> I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years. Did it even work usefully? While Linux itself retains backwards compatible drivers for a long time, X.org and others aren't quite as diligent. E.g., five years ago I could not run any up to date distribution on Pentium 4 era notebooks with anything more than unaccelerated VESA framebuffers, because there were no compatible drivers for their…

I feel like this is a place where slackware shines. They keep pushing out security updates for years.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#16

Post by pjmlp »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

Or switch to a less pragmatic distribution.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#17

Post by DanBC »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

> Side effect will be that people will be encouraged to get a modern computer if not already.

All those netbooks (atom processors; 1 GB or 2 GB ram; 32 GB hard drive) would be great with Linux (once the drivers get fixed) and really benefit from 32 bit because of the ram limitations.

Now? They'll end up in landfill.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#18

Post by CJefferson »

StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

The switch to the 'python' command running python 3, as a non-arch user, put me off Arch forever. It just broke everything, which had long assumed 'python' would run python 2.

Not installing python 2, and just python 3, with the name python3, would have been fine.

Arch put us in a situation where it was basically impossible to run python 2 with a #! line, as some distros hadn't yet introduced a 'python2' symlink yet.

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#19

Post by Asooka »

CJefferson wrote: post #18
StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

The switch to the 'python' command running python 3, as a non-arch user, put me off Arch forever. It just broke everything, which had long assumed 'python' would run python 2. Not installing python 2, and just python 3, with the name python3, would have been fine. Arch put us in a situation where it was basically impossible to run python 2 with a #! line, as some distros hadn't yet introduced a 'python2' symlink yet.

In fairness, this was back when we all thought Py3 would take over Py2 "any day now"™

Re: Arch Linux pulls the plug on 32-bit

#20

Post by tbranyen »

CJefferson wrote: post #18
StreakyCobra wrote: post #12

It is one of the reasons that makes me love Arch: developers are pragmatic. They were always in the early birds for taking decision about the future, like switching to Python3 as default interpreter system-wide, embracing the change to systemd, and now this. The rolling release aspect imposes to stay as close as possible to upstream versions because upstream does not wait on Arch to update their dependencies to newer…

The switch to the 'python' command running python 3, as a non-arch user, put me off Arch forever. It just broke everything, which had long assumed 'python' would run python 2. Not installing python 2, and just python 3, with the name python3, would have been fine. Arch put us in a situation where it was basically impossible to run python 2 with a #! line, as some distros hadn't yet introduced a 'python2' symlink yet.

It really wasn't that bad and the AUR + official channels had patched packages with the correct shebang line. The worst offender for a while was the node-waf builder, had to patch it manually to get any packages to build, otherwise you needed a command line arg every time. This was like 5 years ago tho... These days I have never hit an issue w/ a properly installed python package.
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