Fedora Plans to Drop 32-Bit i686 Packages
Anonymous Coward writes:
The Fedora project is planning to reduce its package maintenance burden by dropping support for 32-bit x86 (i686) packages from the distribution's repositories. The plan detailed in the (mislabelled) change proposal is to drop 32-bit packages for Fedora 44. "By dropping completely the i686 architecture, Fedora will decrease the burden on package maintainers, release engineering, infrastructure, and users. Building and maintaining packages for i686 (and 32-bit architectures in general, but i686 is the last 32-bit architecture - partially - supported by Fedora) has been requiring more and more effort.
Many projects have already been officially dropping support for building and / or running on 32-bit architectures, requiring either adding back support for this architecture downstream in Fedora, or requiring packaging changes in a significant number of packages to adapt to this dropped support." The discussion under the proposal points out some of the situations where users will be unable to run software, such as the Steam gaming portal, under the current plan.
- - https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20014
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