All 32-bit packages will be removed by the end of the month

Nov 8, 2017 15:30 GMT  ·  By

The Arch Linux devs announced today that they are officially terminating support for 32-bit architectures, removing all i686 packages from the repositories by the end of the month.

At the beginning of the year, on January 25, Arch Linux's Bartłomiej Piotrowski announced that they are phasing out 32-bit (i686) support for the operating system beginning March 1, 2017, no longer building monthly ISO snapshots that support 32-bit installation.

Arch Linux 2017.02.01 was the last monthly ISO snapshot released with 32-bit support, as all ISO snapshots that followed included only 64-bit packages, but existing 32-bit installations were still supported for a 9-month period during which users were had to move to 64-bit.

That support ends today, November 8, 2017, effective immediately, and all 32-bit (i686) packages will be removed from the Arch Linux's mirrors by the end of the month, as well as from its repositories by the end of the year.

"Following 9 months of deprecation period, support for the i686 architecture effectively ends today," said the devs in today's announcement. "By the end of November, i686 packages will be removed from our mirrors and later from the packages archive."

Arch Linux 32 fork lets users run the OS on 32-bit PCs

If you still have a very old 32-bit computer, one that doesn't have a 64-bit processor, it would appear that you can still run Arch Linux by using a fork created by the community, named Arch Linux 32. Please visit the fork's official website to see how to migrate.

Like many other GNU/Linux distributions, Arch Linux is now a full 64-bit operating system, and you can download the latest ISO snapshot, Arch Linux 2017.11.01, right now from the official website or via our web portal if you want to run Arch Linux on your PC.