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Fedora proposal to drop 32-bit support has been withdrawn (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Is dropping support for 32bit hardware more important than being able to run on everything?

Because it has always seemed like one of Linux’s core strengths is that no matter what your hardware is, you can run Linux on it.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Is dropping support for 32bit hardware more important than being able to run on everything?

    Yes evidently, because they dropped that hardware support in 2019. Specifically they dropped 32-bit x86 kernels in Fedora 31

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I think the last time I had a 32 bit CPU was around 2005 but I could be remembering that incorrectly. Supporting 20 year old hardware isn't always easy.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It isn't easy, but this isn't about the hardware. It's about the software packages. Tons of software meant to run on 32-bit hasn't been updated to run on 64-bit natively. Thus the burden of keeping a lot of packages that serve as backwards compatibility.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Tons of software meant to run on 32-bit hasn’t been updated to run on 64-bit natively.

    32bit only Linux apps are basically non-existent, anything with the source available and maintainers would have been ported at some point in the last 2 decades, otherwise they have very specific technical reasons for being 32bit only (like OBS iiuc), the source has been lost somehow, or it's a proprietary program where the company has no interest (e.g. Valve with Steam)

    In fact I think Steam might really be it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Being able to run on everything is nice, but what you're actually asking for here is for a highly skilled (and rare) distro maintainer to dedicate substantial amounts of time to maintaining and testing thousands of packages on 32 bit systems in case someone wants to use it. It's not just like users get to click a button and voila, they can run more games than before.

    If you really need to use 32 bit software, eventually you'll just have to manage it yourself because no one else is able to do it for you. That capability will almost never go away.

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