On Tue, 2015-08-04 at 11:12 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Here's my perspective as an i686 Fedora user...
I have a box (2009-ish) that's in use as a file/backup server. As
such, I don't
spend a lot of time futzing with it - it doesn't run rawhide, it
rarely runs
the prereleases until beta or later time. If something breaks, I'll
look at
it, send some feedback, update it as necessary, and back off to a
working
version. And historically, it *hasn't* broken.
But, if it did break that hard... would I spend a month digging into
the
kernel source and bisecting to try and find a fix? Or would I spend
the
$100-120 to slap a new motherboard in it and install the x86_64
version?
I'd like to say I'd do the former. But realisitically it's the
latter. And I
wonder how much of the i686 Fedora-using community is in the same
boat.
So we have a product that is installed on about ~80 netbooks running
i386-PAE kernels. They are now running f21 I think. I considered
updating them but they are offline machines for nearly their entire
life. I had contemplated putting CentOS 7 but there is no i386 for
that. I would imagine that the hardware would be replaced by newer
netbooks that handle x64. If they can't be they'll run EOL'd versions
of fedora till death. If I can update them eventually it wouldn't
matter to me if the i386 system saw less love but eventually came out.
Granted if fedora dropped i386 completely I'd find a distro to use that
supported it I guess if any. It wouldn't be the end of the world for
me.
--
Nathanael