In reality - there's very little hardware newer than ten years old that's economic to run - x86_6r4 has been around for long enough that 64 bit hardware is cheap. The overhead of compiling _pure_ 32 bit is significant to keep going. It's not for nothing that Debian's 32 bit target has gradually moved from 386 to 586 to 686 - an early Geode is probably at the very end of its support lifestyle. pretty much everything else other than Debian has dropped full 32 bit support. It will be there for Bullseye but that will almost certainly be the last.
Ubuntu has already dropped 32 bit support once, reintroduced very limited support and it will probably go again. Maybe not before time - the laptop I'm typing this on is eight years old or so, the sort of thing you'd pull from a junk pile, has been rescued by adding a cheap SSD and ran 32 bit Windows originally. It's equivalent can probaby be picked up off the back shelf in any computer recycling shop. On Mon, Sep 7, 2020 at 5:50 PM deloptes <delop...@gmail.com> wrote: > Andrew Cater wrote: > > > Potentially zero difference - until the 32 bit browser just isn't there > > any more / isn't patched. This is the sort of question that the debian-cd > > team are also pondering: as the years go on, it is harder and harder to > > justify 32 bit software at least for the x86 architecture. There are > > already problems with some software that just won't build well in a 32 > bit > > environment. > > this would be unfortunate because I am sure there is enough 32bit hardware > out there still working quite well - like mine Geode based firewall - it is > running since 2008. > I am sure even if debian drops the support of 32bit something else will > take > it over. > >
