Fedora 32bit support WAS: Re: Call for agenda for Workstation WG meeting 2015-Aug-05

[Donald Buchan]

(snip)

> There's a new "Validity of i686 as a release blocker" thread on
> fedora-devel where the kernel team is saying that they are no longer
> interested in supporting i686:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-August/213118.ht
> ml
> 
> We should make up a position whether we want to continue with the 
> i686
> version of the Workstation product. I can see two outcomes depending 
> on
> which way this goes; one would be that we ask the kernel team to
> continue supporting i686, and the other one is that we stop shipping 
> the
> i686 Workstation images.
> 
> I don't think anything in between (we ship unsupported images) makes 
> sense.
> 
> I am personally of the mind that it's time to let i686 go. Perhaps 
> not
> for F23, but F24 for sure.

Here is my personal user experience, based on an edge (although perhaps
not extreme) case:

I own an Acer Aspire One (32bit, 1.6 GHz single core with 2 gigs ram
and 160gig hard drive) which I *had* wanted to have gone on living with
Fedora as long as the hardware didn't die, such as a hard drive spin
out, a thermal event, or physical damage due to dropping or the like;
nothing of the sort has yet occurred and the physical hardware still
works.

It worked great until and including F17; I skipped F18.  It worked
acceptably and, depending on the use case, even occasionally well under
F19, although I could tell that I was pushing the limits.  YouTube and
other videos could be difficult to watch (read choppy).  I skipped F20.

I installed F21 Workstation last January on the Acer, and while I had
to fight a bit to install it, it finally worked.  However, it was
obvious that the hardware was inadequate for the task.  Routine tasks
were often sluggish at best, load times were slow, and the machine
would hang as though (to me) there were a kernel panic, often enough
lasting for several minutes, sometimes into 10 and 20 minutes, or until
I did a reboot.  This would occur sometimes after hours of use or
sometimes after a fresh boot.  I knew that the single user console was
easily accessible and of course the command line was still lightning
fast (ie. the desktop was too top heavy, but command line no doubt
still usable) but as a desktop it was becoming unusable.

I bought a new laptop in June, and installed F22.  The Acer currently
has CentOS 6 on it, the last release to have a 32bit image, and it's
based on F12-F13, which worked rather well on the Acer.

So for the desktop, be it the workstation or some of the other spins
... I'd have to say that there would have to be a compelling business
case to continue supporting it; some of the traditional laptop and
desktop hardware use cases are starting to age out, based on my limited
personal experience.

As for the other products and spins, I don't really know enough other
than to say that I have the impression that 32bit linux on the command
line no doubt is still good and would work well enough as a headless
server, such as a light-duty home server or vanity server.

And here's another perspective:  RHEL 7 doesn't have a 32 bit image. 
 While Fedora tries to reach a certain greater market which RHEL from
now on appears to not be interested in (and rightly so), I personally
agree that Fedora is arguably at a tipping point.

Thank you