Official Arch Linux ISO Image to Drop 32-bit (i686) Support Starting March 2017

Potential adopters, that is, of 32-bit Arch who may be on-the-fence about trying out Arch on their 2GB-or-less RAM i686 PC's of ten yrs ago or more. Such potential distro adopters have one less mildly-popular 32bit distro to choose from among that long, bewildering list of distros at Distrowatch.com

Even though "from November 2017 onwards, i686 support is becoming obsolete" ON ARCH.... the same just ain't so on Debian, Slackware, Puppy, and the major BSD's. Therefore, it seems to me that i686-owning people will NATUIRALLY gravitate to the remaining popular 32bit distros.

2c

Even as someone whose last laptop lasted over 10 years before being replaced over a year ago, I don't mind this drop of 32-bit support so much now. As for desktop pc's, you have to go back 12 years to the Intel P4's to find 32-bit only CPUs now. And even if the OS's continue 32-bit support, many apps are dropping it as well, such as Google Chrome.

> I don't mind this drop of 32-bit support so much now.

My wife and I both have 32 bit Atom processor laptops that still work. Obviously we won't be able to use Arch on them. Fortunately, I'm a Slackware user.

> My wife and I both have 32 bit Atom processor laptops that still work.

Ah, I forgot about the Atoms being 32-bit.

Not all Atoms are 32-bit. Some of the Atoms introduced in the middle and later portions of that processor "brand" were 64-bit. I have some 32-bit and some 64-bit Atom based machines.

> Not all Atoms are 32-bit.

No, but the early ones were. And there are still a lot of those laptops/netbooks out there. But that's not really Arch's market, so I can understand their not worrying about it.

I think there are probably more 64 bit Atoms than 32 bit ones, but there are a significant number of 32 bit ones still. There is one sitting on the desk behind me that I have used a fair amount. It has Debian on it, so I'm not that concerned about it staying useful for a while. This is a machine that is really a lot easier to use with Linux than the Windows XP that came with it because of its two 8GB SSDs. That is, if you put Windows XP on it and let it run all the updates, it will run out of space on the C: drive unless you take special care to make room (move the page file to D:, delete backed up original files after updates, etc.) With Linux, you just use LVM to make the drives into one 16 GB drive and install the system on that (of course you can manage Linux on an 8GB drive a lot better than XP in any case).

> I think there are probably more 64 bit Atoms than 32 bit ones

At this point, yes. They've been 64 bit for quite a while now. But computers have gotten to the point where they can last 10 years or more, so there are a lot of the 32 bit ones still in service.

If there is still a significant enough demand for i686 and it gravitates towards the remaining distributions supporting it, this is a good thing. While it reduces the options to those users it consolidates the community and resources.