[nebulon]

Will be interesting if a part of the community "forks" arch like they did for 16bit back then. However lowarch is apparently also dead by now: http://www.lowarch.org/

I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.

[creshal]

> I still have that installed on a i386 machine, but not booted since years.

Did it even work usefully? While Linux itself retains backwards compatible drivers for a long time, X.org and others aren't quite as diligent.

E.g., five years ago I could not run any up to date distribution on Pentium 4 era notebooks with anything more than unaccelerated VESA framebuffers, because there were no compatible drivers for their integrated graphics card any more. (At the same time, we still had Pentium 4 servers in production use!)

[stinkytaco]

I feel like this is a place where slackware shines. They keep pushing out security updates for years.

[rlpb]

Do they need to fork? The reason given is "decreasing popularity of i686 among the developers and the community". If enough developers were prepared to maintain a fork, why wouldn't they just do it as part of the Arch project? As far as I can tell, they're not being turned away; it's being dropped because there isn't anyone to turn away.