[Dev] Fwd: Deprecation of i686

[Luke Shumaker]

On Tue, 30 May 2017 11:55:49 -0400,
Megver83 wrote:
> Hi, as you may know, in November Arch drops i686 support, and I was
> thinking about doing the same. Is not that I'm against of maintaining
> it, because if that's what the community wishes, I have no problem
> about. As we know, there are plenty of distros that are still available
> for i686 (free ones and non-free ones), and as x64 PCs are much more
> than 32-bits ones (we could do a survey maybe?) I start to understand
> the reason of dropping the support for this architecture.
> 
> so, what do you think?

Previous discussion: https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2017-January/004735.html

Summary:
	
 - several people voiced that they have an i686 computer that they'd
   like to keep using:
     hackers: (3) emulatorman, gaming4jc, and myself
     users: (1) Nathan Edson
   Of these we've lost emulatorman as a hacker since then.

 - Because of libreboot, i686 is over-represented in Free-Software
   circles compared to the general population; a user interested in
   Parabola is more likely to have an i686 computer than a user
   interested in Arch. (By my count, 17%-22% of the libreboot
   compatibility list is i686, depending on if you want to count the
   T60, which can be cheaply upgraded to x86_64).

-- 
Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker