> Well, one of things I pleasantly discovered on Debian 13, is though it > no longer supports i386 as installable nor provides i386 (686) 32-bit > kernels, it does still have most everything else still available in i386 > architecture.
IIUC one of the main use-cases of the i386 port nowadays is to support running old (proprietary) i386 binaries in virtual machines. As long as that's kept as one of the goals, then indeed you should be fine if you can find some other kernel (either from an older Debian or one you compiled yourself) Currently I'm using the above setup for my trusty Thinkpad X30. I don't know how long that'll last, tho. As others have pointed out, it's hard to justify the effort to maintain that port since there's a lot of amd64-capable hardware being discarded anyway. In my case, I use my Thinkpad to project the PDF slides when I teach, where the main value is to show to my students that a computer older than them can still get regular updates, so they should consider it *unacceptable* their much more recent devices stop receiving updates. It's also a good conversation piece when I explain to them that back when I received that computer, the rate of hardware improvement suggested that by 2026 we'd have laptops with TBs of RAM and thousands of CPUs running at >100GHz, so I would have never imagined back then finding this Thinkpad still usable in 2026 with anything vaguely resembling modern software. When Debian finally drops support for i386, I guess I'll just move to the 3 years older T60 (where I already upgraded the CPU to run amd64), which is actually a lot more usable (for many/most tasks, I don't really notice much difference between that and a modern machine). === Stefan
