Microarchitecture drop

If you’re running a 32-bit CPU, your options are shrinking.

While 64-bit processors are becoming ever more popular, there’s still a number of us who use 32-bit hardware and while there will always be distros available that support older and legacy hardware, there have also been some recent announcements that make finding a distro to run on 32-bit software much more difficult.

For example, it has been announced that Tails 3.0 will require a 64-bit x86-64 processor, with support for 32-bit ending on June 13, 2017. As the Tails project mentions in its announcement of the news, only 4% of Tails users use a 32-bit computer. While it’s not good news for that small minority, the team behind Tails say that the move to 64-bit only will benefit its users, thanks to improved security features and greater compatibility between the 64-bit Linux kernel that it uses and 32-bit software.

Meanwhile, the February update of Arch Linux has been revealed to be the last that will include a download option for 32-bit hardware, with an announcement ( http://bit.ly/ArchDropsi686) stating that “Due to the decreasing popularity of i686 among the developers and the community, we have decided to phase out the support of this architecture”. 32-bit users won’t be left in the lurch completely as people with 32-bit installs will continue to receive upgraded packages for a ‘depreciation period’, but by November 2017 32-bit support will be completely dropped.

While we’re sad to see distros ditch 32-bit support, we can see their arguments. Thankfully, Linux is such a broad church that there will always be the likes of TinyCore, Absolute Linux and Linux Lite that will make sure people with 32-bit and older hardware still have access to an operating system.