On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 04:56:56AM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 11:26:56PM +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 06:50:19AM +0100, KatolaZ wrote:
> you  might probably want to have a look at:
>
>   http://popcon.devuan.org/
>
> Whatever the statistical significance of those data, it seems that
> between 15% and 20% of Devuan installations are on i386. So apparently
> there is no reason at all to drop it, rather the opposite.

Then this looks like a problem that needs to be looked at.  There's no way
that many people use gear from ≤ 2004 (or a brief throwback of early Atoms
from 2008).

THere's at least one.  My laptop runs an Atom processor.  It was the
first EEEPC that was completely Linux-compatible without requiring any
nonfree drivers, and came out anout a year after the first EEEPC.

Until it came on the market, I  was looking with dismay at all the
hugely expensive, overpowered, battery draining machines on the
market.  Years later, I can still go to a coffee chop for an
afternoon's writing without needing to bring along a power supply.

It is still performing well.  In fact, for some things (videoo codecs
coe to mind) it runs a lot better now than it did when I bought it)
Google has abandoned it, but I haven't, and Linux hasn't either.

I have upgraded the RAM from 1 to 2 G, and replaced the hard drive
with a much bigger one.  It's running fine, and hasn't needed repairs.

By contrast, my 64-bit server is on its last legs.

All of these machines are old enough not to have malware built into
the hardware, as far as I can tell.  I'm not looking forward to having
to upgrade to hardwar containing malware.

Please help keep 32-bit architecture alive.  I've been running Devuan
since the alpha-2 release.

-- hendrik


--
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I'm probably a little late to comment, but here's my two cents' worth.

My laptop, which runs Devuan, is a heavily-used Samsung N150p which was
purchased from a friend for $40 USD, it also runs an Intel Atom processor
(although I prefer ARM), and it is predominantly 32-bit:

$ uname -a
Linux MB 3.16.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.16.39-1 (2016-12-30) i686 GNU/Linux

$ lshw
...
product: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450   @ 1.66GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 1
bus info: cpu@0
version: 6.12.10
serial: 0001-06CA-0000-0000-0000-0000
size: 1667MHz
capacity: 1667MHz
width: 64 bits
...

There is 2GB of RAM, and anything that uses "hardware acceleration"
grinds to a halt and can take minutes between screen refreshes.

$ free -h
            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2.0G       186M       1.8G       460K        28M        90M
-/+ buffers/cache:        67M       1.9G
Swap:         9.3G         0B       9.3G

I love my laptop, however, because the whole thing is ~8x11 inches, and
can be brought everywhere. I use it for programming from the termninal;
there is no "greeter" installed and it boots straight to getty. I use
a text-mode editor (which will not be mentioned to avoid flames (it's
not emacs ;P)) and that's it.

While the Atom processor DOES support 64-bit computing, it seems that
every instruction takes twice as long -- it takes 30 minutes to boot a
Tails live image. (Yes, I know about heads; it didn't boot.)

For people like me, the "latest and greatest" features are simply useless
overhead that makes things bigger, slower, heavier, hotter, and/or use
more electricity.

With all due respect, I would appreciate it if 32-bit processors would
continue to be supported. (ARM too, I'll finish my Raspberry PI 3B-based
laptop Real Soon Now! (Maybe next weekend... next month...))

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