The future of 32-bit Linux

In my comment above, I was thinking specifically of the AMD/Intel 32 bit only architecture. Over the years in Debian, we've had to effectively change the minimum spec of the processor it runs on - it's now, effectively, i686 and some of the Via and Cyrix processors are excluded - and a lot of the hardware that is 32 bit only out in the world is increasingly unreliable with the years. I spent yesterday working with the Debian images team producing boot images. Every AMD/Intel 64 bit machine (apart from the Itanium) can boot 32 bit code but can also run 64 bit code. One comment made then: running the oldest 32 bit laptop is probably less effective than running a slightly newer second hand Thinkpad and moving to newer models every few years: maybe the oldest machines do need to go to recycling

The long term future of AMD/Intel 32 bit only is rapidly downhill, I think, though I'm fairly sure that we've committed to supporting it for the lifetime of Debian 11 (Bullseye) - the discussions on architectures are going on at the moment as Bullseye will be released next year and porters and maintainers for the various architectures have to step up and be counted at the moment.

In the ARM world, there's a large number of small boards / embedded systems as noted - but it's hard to build 32 bit code for some large packages on the 32 bit boards themselves because they have small memory. Some packages have to be built on an ARM 64 bit platform in a 32 bit environment - not all ARM 64 bit processors will now run 32 bit code. Various build farms of small boards are also increasingly flaky to support. [Speaking for myself and not on behalf of the Debian project].