[gardaani]

Debian Trixie drops 32-bit x86 support. Ubuntu dropped 32-bit support already earlier, which meant that lightweight Lubuntu and Xubuntu don't support it either. It's sad to see old hardware support getting dropped like that. They are still good machines as servers and desktop terminals.

Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support? Do I have to switch to NetBSD?

[pedrocr]

> They are perfectly good machines as servers and desktop terminals.

On the power usage alone surely an upgrade to a still extremely old 64bit machine would be a significant upgrade. For a server that you run continuously a 20+ year old machine will consume quite a bit.

[yobbo]

Among the possible reasons for keeping old machines are specific expansion cards or peripherals that only work on old motherboards.

Whether that motivates debian support is another question.

[adrian_b]

Indeed. I still keep around a couple of old computers, because they have PCI slots (parallel, not PCIe), unlike any newer computer that I have, and I still use some PCI cards for certain purposes.

However, those computers are not so old as to have 32-bit CPUs, they are only about 10 years old, but that was because I was careful at that time to select MBs that still had PCI slots, in order to be able to retire all older computers.

[p_l]

The only peripherals that truly don't work in more modern boards would be AMR/ACR/CNR? ISA and plain PCI being reasonably easy to acquire expansion boxes (might be a problem for EISA though, I guess...)

[alexey-salmin]

I mean, if you have antique hardware why not run an antique OS on it? What's the point of upgrading?

[hnarn]

> Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support?

I would rather be surprised if there isn't. I think antiX is one option,[1] PuppyLinux and probably Alpine Linux.

[1]: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/will-antix-24-suppor...

[miohtama]

> It's sad to see old hardware support getting dropped like that.

The problem is that someone needs to work to support different hardware architectures. More exotic hardware, more complicated and expensive the work becomes.

People who run these 32-bit machines are unlikely to vouch in terms of work contributed or money contributed to get the people paid for this work, so it is better to drop the support and focus the same developer resources on areas which benefits larger user base.

[snvzz]

the real problem is Linux is written in such manner that APIs change very often, and code all over the place including drivers is monkeyed without testing and often broken, sometimes in very subtle and hard to debug ways.

It is an overall design issue. Linux has a huge maintenance burden.

[miohtama]

Indeed it is. I am not sure if BSD people have better support for legacy hardware. Outside BSD, there is no competition for open source operating systems, or generally legacy PC hardware systems overall as Windows support was dropped long time ago.

[themafia]

The kernel APIs change never and 32bit support is still within the kernel without any issue at all. How does this implicate drivers?

The rest is user space code. Usually in C. Which has plentiful facilities for managing this. We've been doing it for decades. How is it a sudden burden to continue?

Where are the examples of distributions failing because of this "issue?"

[adrian_b]

The internal kernel API used by device drivers changes at every version, even at minor versions.

If you maintain an out-of-tree driver, it is extremely likely that it will fail to compile at every new kernel release.

The most common reasons are that some definitions have been moved from one kernel header to another or some members have been added to a structure or deleted from it, or some arguments have been added to a function invocation or deleted from it.

While the changes required to fix a broken device driver are typically small, finding which they are can require wasting a lot of time. The reason is that I have never seen any of the kernel developers who make these changes that break unrelated device drivers writing any migration document that instructs the device maintainers how to change the old source code to be compatible with the new interfaces.

Normally there is absolutely no explanation about the purpose of the changes and about what the users of the old API should do. Only in rare cases scanning the kernel mail messages may find some useful information. In other cases you just have to read the kernel source, to discover the intentions of whoever has changed the API.

That does the job eventually, but it consumes far more time than it should.

Even in-tree drivers for old devices, which may no longer have a current maintainer, will become broken eventually.

[miohtama]

If you think it is not a burden you are free to maintain yourself. This is the core value promise of open source.

[themafia]

> are unlikely to vouch in terms of work contributed or money contributed

Unlikely? Did anyone bother to ask?

[guappa]

Yes

[themafia]

They must not have done a very good job then.

[shellac]

> Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support?

When your kernel stopped support over a decade ago (iirc) it does seem inevitable that distros will slowly evaporate.

[bjackman]

Linux didn't drop support for 32bit x86.

You might be thinking of i386 or something.

[eloisant]

OK, I have to precise it because this comment is not super clear...

They're no longer providing 32-bit images. However if you have a 64-bit processor, and a 64-bit image, you can still run 32-bit binaries.

[ahartmetz]

I have actually upgraded a really old 32 bit only laptop from bookworm to trixie - it works. Two important (for the desktop environment) packages required SSE3 which the CPU doesn't support, so... I installed package "sse3-support" with environment variable IGNORE_ISA=1 set. The kernel was not upgraded because trixie doesn't contain an i386 kernel. The laptop works surprisingly okay, though of course it's not much fun with its weak performance, low RAM and mechanical disk.

[ethan_smith]

Void Linux, MX Linux, antiX, and Slackware still maintain 32-bit x86 support with active development.

[BrenBarn]

Isn't MX Linux Debian based? Would this mean they'll also be dropping it when they shift their base to Trixie?

[jraph]

They could always build upon the remaining 32 bit support and provide a kernel build themselves (I don't know the project though)

[zozbot234]

32-bit userspace packages are still supported, though with increased hardware requirements compared to Bookworm. You may find that you're able to run a more-or-less complete 32-bit Trixie userspace, while staying on Bookworm wrt. the kernel and perhaps a few critical packages.

If 32-bit support gets dropped altogether (which might happen for 'forky' or 'duke') it can probably move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure, provided that people are willing to keep it up-to-date.

[cjfd]

I kept my old 32-bit laptop alive for quite a bit using archlinux32 but in the end more and more software started breaking, so that is not really a route I can recommend anymore. I was using the laptop mainly if I was traveling or on holidays, so not so very often so it felt wasteful to to buy a new one. But this year the software breakages really started costing too much time, so I bought a new one. RIP old laptop (2007-2025).

[WhyNotHugo]

Alpine still supports x86 and other 32bit platforms. It’s also very lightweight, though I’d say it targets a very different userbase than Debian or Ubuntu — the default install is quite minimal and requires more setup.

[flohofwoe]

Does dropping 32-bit support just mean that there are no supported x86-32 OS images, or that 32-bit applications are generally not supported?

If it means that no 32-bit apps are supported, how does Steam handle this? Does it run 32-bit games in a VM? Is the Steam client itself a 64-bit application these days or still stuck on 32-bits?

[unleaded]

There is no 32-bit kernel build or ISO image anymore but you can upgrade to Trixie from Bookworm.

[abhinavk]

No x86-32 images.

[flohofwoe]

Ah ok, that sounds much less dramatic than 'dropping 32-bit support' :)

[aragilar]

The "i386" is now basically x86-32 compatibility. I think there were suggestions of an unofficial port which hosted x86-32.

[qwertox]

Just keep in mind that this does not apply to armhf, which is 32 bits and all old Raspberry Pi boards use.

What's your use case for 32-bit x86 where you are still keeping Debian at its latest version? Alone for the power consumption you might be better off by switching to a newer low-spec machine.

[tmtvl]

Gentoo supports pretty much everything under the sun.

[FirmwareBurner]

>It's sad to see old hardware support getting dropped like that. They are still good machines as servers and desktop terminals

How many 32 bit PCs are still actively in used at scale to make that argument? Linux devs are now missing kernel regression bugs on 64bit Core 2 Duo hardware because not enough people are using them anymore to catch and report these bugs, and those systems are newer and way more capable for daily driving than 32 bit ones. So then if nobody uses Core 2 Duo machines anymore, how many people do you think are using 32bit Pentium 4/Athlon XP era machines to make that argument?

But let's pretend you're right, and assume there's hoards of Pentium 4 users out there refusing to upgrade for some bizarre reason, and are unhappy they can't run the latest Linux, then using a Pentium 4 with its 80W TDP as a terminal would be an insane waste of energy when that's less capable than some no-name Android table with a 5W ARM SoC which can even play 1080p Youtube while the Pentium 4 cannot even open a modern JS webpage. Even most of the developing world now has more capable mobile devices in their pockets and don't have use for the Pentium 4 machines that have long been landfilled.

And legacy industrial systems still running Pentium 4 HW, are just happy to keep running the same Windows XP/Embedded they came from the factory since those machines are airgapped and don't need to use latest Linux kernel for their purpose.

So sorry, but based on this evidence, your argument is literally complaining for the sake of complaining about problems that nobody outside of retro computing hobbyists have who like using old HW for tinkering with new SW as a challenge. But it's not a real issue for anyone. So what I don't get is the entitled expectations that the SW industry should keep writing new SW for free to keep it working for your long outdated 25+ year old CPU just because you, for some reason, refuse to upgrade to more modern HW that can be had for free.

There are good faith arguments to be had about the state of forced obsolescence in the industry with Microsoft, Apple, etc, but this is not one of them.

>Are there any good Linux distros left with 32-bit x86 support? Do I have to switch to NetBSD?

Yes there are, tonnes: AntiX, Devuan, Damn Small Linux, Tiny Core Linux, etc

[Traubenfuchs]

> 80W TDP as a desktop terminal would be an insane waste of energy when that's less capable than some no-name Android table with a 5W ARM SoC which can even paly 1080p Youtube while the Pentium 4 cannot

Insane how far hardware got: the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive and now a pentium 4 looks almost as ridiculous and outdated to us as vacuum tube computers.

[arcade79]

What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

I ran a mailserver for thousands of people on a 486 DX 33Mhz. It had smtp, pop3 and imap. It was more than powerful enough to handle it with ease.

I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

These days I have a a machine from 2018 or 2019, which I upgraded to 32G of RAM and I added an NVME drive in addition to the spinning rust earlier this year.. because firefox got (extremely, more than a minute to start the browser) sluggish due to an HDD instead of NVME.

Now, it's obvious that an NVME drive is superior, but it surprises me how incredibly lackadaisical we've gotten with resource usage. It surprises me how little "extra" we get, except ads that requires more and more resources. Sure, we've got higher resolution photos, higher resolution videos, and now AI will require vast resources (which of course is cool). At the same time, we don't get that much more utility out of our computers.

[FirmwareBurner]

>What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

Only if you ignore the business economic realities of the world we live in. Unless you work at hyperscaleres of MS/google/meta where every fraction of percent optimization save millions of dollars, nobody is pays SW engineers to optimize SW for old consumer devices because it's money wasted you won't recoup so you offload it on the customer to buy better HW. Rinse and repeat.

>I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

Why isn't it supremely capable anymore? It will still be just as capable if you run the same software from 1999 on it. Or do you expect to run 2025 SW on it?

[gary_0]

Chips that old would be on a ~100nm process node, which is ancient. Anything using Flintstone transistors like those isn't going to hold up.

> the pentium 4 engineers probably felt like the smartest people alive

The P4's NetBurst architecture had some very serious issues, so that might not be true. NetBurst assumed that 10GHz clock speeds would soon be a thing, and some of the engineers back then might have had enough insight to guess that this approach was based on an oversimplified view of semiconductor industry trends. The design took a lot of stupid risks, such as the ridiculously long instruction pipeline, and they were always unlikely to pay off.

[guappa]

> that's less capable than some no-name Android table

You cannot run the software you want on that device, so I don't see how you can claim that.

[FirmwareBurner]

Did you read the comment I was replying to? They said old 32 bit systems can still be kept around to be used as a terminal. I replied saying that Android tablets can also be used as terminals with the right SW if that's what you're after.

Or if you have specific X86 terminal SW, use a PC with a 64 bit CPU if you want to run modern PC SW. They've been making them since 2003. That's 23 years of used 64bit HW on the market that you can literally get for free at this point.

Or keep using your old 32 bit system to run your old 32 bit terminal SW. Nobody's taking away your ability to run your old 32 bit version of the SW when new 64 bit SW comes out.