Why, it's obsolete ?!

indeed, but my Eee PC 901 does not support x86_64

It's still 2025-11-22 currently in my time, 2042 should still meet that requirement


For the sake of my Eee PC 901, please keep x32 architecture for Linux


I came to Fosdem each and every year since 2010 with my Eee PC 901 : 10 h lasting time on battery!
I downgraded to using terminal + vi for taking notes since 2017 but it still worked! I upgraded it to 2 GB RAM lately to run Mageia 9 and Gnome (one of the last distribution still supporting 32 bit, Debian and Ubuntu having abandonned it :/)

Let our ancient (and still usable) hardware run correctly! (well, I've put to the bin too many pentium 4, still keeping many core2duo in our fablab, among them a few iMac & MacBook Pro running happily Debian GNU/Linux)


What can I do to convince you?
Running a rain-dance?
Launching a voodoo threat on you? (that would be a bad idea imho, both for you and me)
Send you chocobon (yeah, Lindt, not even from my country)
Perhaps tell you I'm Briton? (you know, the country not in Britain, it's the other side of the channel: Brittany, in France where we speak a terrible English, but our butter is better and our Krampouezh also known as Crêpe is the best, particularly Kaletez with sausage and mustard).
Yeah I can be very opinionated (yeah opinionated, stubborn, obstinate are valid too), did I tell you I'm Briton? (and French, maybe that's suficient?)

Just abandon x32 and (why not?) armv7 like armv6


As the other abandoned ones: 6502, 6809, 8051, 680x0, i386 then i586 only keeping i686... well STM-32 boards may still run Linux?

I've seen amd64 supported with kernel-2.6 (our eagle-usb driver got replaced with ueagle_atm thanks to one of our contributor, rewriting it to freebsd :p then ported back to Linux (2 klines of code being more maintanable than 9000 lines of bad duplicated code)

Let's see what ARMv7 deserves, powerPC, risc-V, mips and other friendly architectures...

PostmarketOS and maybe Gentoo could be the last distributions available? Let's hope that cross-compiling remains available :p


Galaxy Tab

I still have a Galaxy Tab 10" and a Galaxy Tab 2 fully operational but not maintained, LineageOS even discarded them a while ago and Replicant 6 is no more an option :/

Do they deserve the dust bin?
I could still use them to listen to music or play old games or read epub even though surfing the web and watch videos would be a challenge


I did count on Debian


well, so many architectures... I was hoping that Debian infrastructure could adapt to keeping x32 somewhere (even if built later, with less packages)
with Mageia 9, only i686 x86_64 and arm (not sure v5 still supported, v7 for sure at least)


well... so be it, without anyone, without gcc nor LLVM (eh I counted on you too in the game!)

running in a VM?


well, VM may be the right way to go, even 8 bits games still work ;-)
But that would be the other way around:

keeping which WM?

Because, there's a choice to be done, not everything will work with only 1 GB RAM and old CPU instructions.
well, exit XFCE (too much based on Gnome), Gnome & KDE

perhaps LXDE and LXQt which are lightweight?
enlightenment of course which runs correctly on smartphones as well (or so I'm told)

i3 and derivatives are good candidates, though may need some adaptation for many of us (as though they are simpler and intuitive IMHO)

well, for the web Firefox is out, so...



Distributions to be checked

in alphabetical order


Sub-sujects to address

distribution to choose for 32 bits, less than 2 GB RAM computers:

References

Because I'm not alone wanting to keep the Sant Real ;-)


https://fr.ubunlog.com/Les-meilleures-distributions-Linux-qui-continuent-de-prendre-en-charge-le-32-bits-en-2024/ (fr) alluding to Debian (before Trixie came out), MX Linux (based on Debian, so same way...), LMDE (based on Debian), Nixos, openSUSE Tumbleweed same as Mageia still having 32 bits distribution, Gentoo and Void Linux.

https://linuxfr.org/news/nouvelles-de-haiku-automne-2025#comment-2006564 Haiku stil compiling for 32 bits (compatibility BeOS?), some applications refusing to do so



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