Hello,

My worry with this is that there's a lot of lower class hardware out there (thin clients, netbooks) where Fedora Workstation runs just fine and still use 32 bits CPUs. In terms of Fedora being adopted and useful for these people I do worry that just not bothering with those is going to constraint the possibilities of promoting Fedora Workstation for a certain audience in the mid run.

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 1:36 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh@redhat.com> wrote:
On Thu, 2015-08-20 at 12:35 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Stephen Gallagher <
> sgallagh@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 15:03 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 08:43:44PM +0200, drago01 wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 8:36 PM, Christian Schaller <
> > > > cschalle@redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > > Well there seems to be more laptops/desktops still in use on
> > > > > i686,
> > > > > and it is not a lot of engineering overhead. Is there a
> > > > > request
> > > > > from
> > > > > release engineering to be allowed to drop i686 media? (I
> > > > > would
> > > > > assume the
> > > > > gains are relatively small since we would need to keep i686
> > > > > packages around for
> > > > > some time regardless of having install media.)
> > > >
> > > > Its the kernel team that said that i686 bugs are low priority
> > > > for
> > > > them.
> > >
> > > That was definitely a big motivator, yes.  But in addition the
> > > statistics Matthew Miller showed at Flock clearly indicate the
> > > trend
> > > is against i686 for some time now.  In fact, there's a good
> > > argument
> > > to be made that we haven't added any significant number of those
> > > systems in some time (years), and it's a zombie population at
> > > this
> > > point (q.v. <http://jwboyer.livejournal.com/49909.html>).
> > >
> > > The overall WG response I recall is to the effect of, "If an i686
> > > media/tree is not going to be well supported, we don't want it in
> > > the
> > > edition we ship."
> > >
> > > I don't think it's extra rel-eng work to ship.  It's not clear
> > > whether
> > > it costs QA any time, but if it doesn't I guess I'd wonder where
> > > the
> > > actual testing is happening. :-) (This is not in any way a dig at
> > > QA.)
> > > So for me, if we can't say with certainty an i686 installation is
> > > an
> > > equivalent experience to x86_64, with the same support, we
> > > shouldn't
> > > ship it.
> > >
> >
> > QA does indeed have to test i686, so it would be a significant
> > reduction in effort for them at release validation time to drop
> > i686.
>
> I'm sure QA is more than capable of speaking for themselves :)

I was speaking as someone who spends at least 8 hours every release
milestone doing exactly that. And I am not alone. So yeah, it's a
significant investment of time that we could reduce.
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Alberto Ruiz
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