I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less horsepower than a raspberry pi or N100.
(Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine these days)
> The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU.
It would probably take a few days to start Steam on one of those considering its load times on current hardware.
e.g. notice that i386 is still listed at the bottom of https://packages.debian.org/trixie/bash
You can recycle e-waste (and yes, I know SOME e-waste ends up in China/India/etc. Not all does.)
The e-waste is of substantially less concern than the massive difference in carbon footprint from power consumption.
It isn't. Had both.
~700MHz mostly in-order ARM 11 without SIMD. Worked with these a lot.
..vs..
1.3GHz out-of-order with SIMD
The goal of universal compatibility that separates the Debian project from commercial software and even other open-source projects.
The legacy x86 architecture is still far more popular than some that platforms that Debian advertises as having official support for and there has been x86 based processors manufactured for niche applications until recently, eg, AMD Geode and others.
I find it really unfortunate Debian Project is removing official support for new x86 installations. The silver lining is it seems like they'll be an unofficial port and it's likely niche distributions like MX Linux and AntiX will maintain their own builds.
It would be ideal if open-source can develop stronger mechanims to keep support for the large numbers of these relatively niche architectures (eg, through increased usage of emulation over real hardware).
$ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l
68737
$ curl -s http://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/trixie/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz | zgrep ^Package: | wc -l
66958If that's all there's to it, you can still use debootstrap, compile a kernel, and point the root parameter to your shiny new install.
If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies.
While theoretically possible, that would only happen on processors older than 30 years. Debian's i386 architecture still uses -march=i686 as its baseline compiler target, which is the venerable Pentium Pro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_(microarchitecture)
It was used in the OLPC XO-1. The Cisco ASA line of firewalls also used Geode processors at least at some point in its lifetime.
(Answering the "to what end?" question, a lot of 32bit-only hardware is still available and dirt cheap in the second-hand market (e.g. early "netbooks"), much of it quite well-built and enjoyable to use. While such hardware can no longer realistically browse the "modern" web, it can still find a lot of use for more lightweight tasks, including acting as a "thin client" for more powerful machines.)
Since i386 is not going to do the 2038 transition either (since that would break the ABI), also you would need to either make a new ABI for the new port, or do the 2038 transition for it too.
Over time more and more 32-bit bugs will get introduced, so there will be lots of maintenance work to do too.
I had seen conflicting information about this, though nothing official. I suppose we'll know more once some actual release planning happens for forky, which might take some time.