Hello,
As we discussed earlier today, I have contacted several desktop environments about their plans that might impact i686. So far, I've written to MATE, LXDE/LXQt, Xfce, Enlightenment and Lumina[0], which I had never heard of before, but I found through dnf. I also discovered Hawaii[1] that way, but their website had only x86_64 stuff, so I didn't bother with them.
Have I forgotten someone?
I've already heard back from Enlightenment, this is their response:
We have nothing that will make it impractical or impossible to run. We still do a lot of work on having EFL and enlightenment run on ARM and ARM is still 99.9% 32bit (ARM64 is still not widely spread). We design our code to run in both situations.
It MAY be that you hit particular bugs that were missed in testing as 32bit installed become far less frequent on x86 (some of them may be interactions between other libraries like Mesa and so on), but nothing specifically to make it impractical or impossible.
Best regards A.
This is the response I received from the Lumina people:
I believe Lumina is essentially agnostic when it comes to platform hardware - there are no plans to drop support for an i686 platform. Lumina is still intended to be very system resource conscious and this will likely be even more true when Lumina 2.0 is released.
That being said, if you decide to incorporate or use Lumina with your project, we're very open to integrating upstream any specific features or troubleshooting your team may add. Just submit a pull request and we'll review and merge it as soon as possible. :)
On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Alexander Ploumistos alex.ploumistos@gmail.com wrote:
This is the response I received from the Lumina people:
I believe Lumina is essentially agnostic when it comes to platform hardware - there are no plans to drop support for an i686 platform. Lumina is still intended to be very system resource conscious and this will likely be even more true when Lumina 2.0 is released.
That being said, if you decide to incorporate or use Lumina with your project, we're very open to integrating upstream any specific features or troubleshooting your team may add. Just submit a pull request and we'll review and merge it as soon as possible. :)
Awesome! Glad to hear upstream is interested in working with us. Thanks for the follow-up.
jeff
On Wed, Sep 6, 2017 at 9:50 PM, Alexander Ploumistos alex.ploumistos@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
As we discussed earlier today, I have contacted several desktop environments about their plans that might impact i686. So far, I've written to MATE, LXDE/LXQt, Xfce, Enlightenment and Lumina[0], which I had never heard of before, but I found through dnf. I also discovered Hawaii[1] that way, but their website had only x86_64 stuff, so I didn't bother with them.
Great! Thanks for taking care of this so quickly.
Have I forgotten someone?
No, I don't think so. I think those represent the vast majority of our potential user base. Never heard of Lumina. I'll have to check it out. :)
I've already heard back from Enlightenment, this is their response:
We have nothing that will make it impractical or impossible to run. We still do a lot of work on having EFL and enlightenment run on ARM and ARM is still 99.9% 32bit (ARM64 is still not widely spread). We design our code to run in both situations.
It MAY be that you hit particular bugs that were missed in testing as 32bit installed become far less frequent on x86 (some of them may be interactions between other libraries like Mesa and so on), but nothing specifically to make it impractical or impossible.
Great! Sounds like we'll at least have one WM we can target. Thanks again for contacting these upstreams.
jeff
This is the reply from LXQt/LXDE:
i686 (Ubuntu and Debian calls it i386) will be supported for some time now (at least for LXQt) if I can help it. Lubuntu uses it and probably won't drop it until at minimum the 20.04 or 22.04 cycle (probably longer than that, we could carry it out to 24.04 or 26.04, we'll see how that all plays out when we get there), unless we are forced by the Ubuntu Release Team to drop it (unlikely but possible). So acting in upstream will be something I would like to do to make sure it stays working on Lubuntu i386, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work in the future. If you have any questions for Lubuntu directly, please feel free to send an email to lubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com and we can talk there.
In respect to LXDE, since it uses GTK 2 I *personally* (not speaking for upstream) don't know how long it'll last upstream unless we get a GTK 3 or 4 port. But that's irrelevant to i386 support.
On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 9:45 PM, Alexander Ploumistos alex.ploumistos@gmail.com wrote:
This is the reply from LXQt/LXDE:
i686 (Ubuntu and Debian calls it i386) will be supported for some time now (at least for LXQt) if I can help it. Lubuntu uses it and probably won't drop it until at minimum the 20.04 or 22.04 cycle (probably longer than that, we could carry it out to 24.04 or 26.04, we'll see how that all plays out when we get there), unless we are forced by the Ubuntu Release Team to drop it (unlikely but possible). So acting in upstream will be something I would like to do to make sure it stays working on Lubuntu i386, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work in the future. If you have any questions for Lubuntu directly, please feel free to send an email to lubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com and we can talk there.
In respect to LXDE, since it uses GTK 2 I *personally* (not speaking for upstream) don't know how long it'll last upstream unless we get a GTK 3 or 4 port. But that's irrelevant to i386 support.
Great! Looks like we have several desktops with upstreams still interested in supporting 32bit.
jeff
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 7:43 PM, Jeff Backus jeff.backus@gmail.com wrote:
Great! Looks like we have several desktops with upstreams still interested in supporting 32bit.
I've left a couple of messages on Xfce's forum and their mailing list, but I haven't heard back.
Meanwhile, on MATE's issue tracker I got a response from our own Wolfgang, who tends to get a bit passionate and carried away: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/issues/289#issuecomment-3276926... You can see he wasn't too thrilled about keeping i686 around…
-
Alexander Ploumistos -
Jeff Backus