Didn't Microsoft drop 16 bit application support in Windows 10? I remember being saddened by my exe of Jezzball I've carried from machine to machine no longer working.
Or Wine, which is less reliable but funnier.
Wine itself doesn't run on Windows AFAIK.
It does, if you use an old enough version of windows that SUA is available :). I never managed to get fontconfig working so text overlapped its dialogue boxes and the like, but it was good enough to run what I needed.
Mind you, Wine might lose that too ...
You'd expect Microsoft to support things because it doesn't make money for them anymore or some other calculated cost reason, but Microsoft is supporting old things few people use even when it costs them performance/secure edges.
Though personally, while I care a lot about using old software on new hardware, my desire to use new software on old hardware only goes so far back and 32 bit mainstream CPUs are out of that range.
Open source isn't where I'd expect abandonware to happen.
Depends on how much power it's wasting, when we're looking at 20 year old desktops/laptops.
> 32 bit is still valid for many applications and environments that don't need >3GB~ ram.
Well my understanding is that if you have 1GB of RAM or less you have nothing to worry about. The major unresolved issue with 32 bit is that it needs complicated memory mapping and can't have one big mapping of all of physical memory into the kernel address space. I'm not aware of a plan to remove the entire architecture.
It's annoying for that set of systems that fit into 32 bits but not 30 bits, but any new design over a gigabyte should be fine getting a slightly different core.
> For example, routers shouldn't use 64bit processors unless they're handling that much load, die size matter there
I don't think that's right, but correct me if I missed something. A basic 64 bit core is extremely tiny and almost the same size as a 32 bit core. If you're heavy enough to run Linux, 64 bit shouldn't be a burden.