Shall we drop i386 / 32-bit? If you think no, please test

[BRM]

Sorry a little late to the discussion... 
Personally I have an old Pentium M laptop (2003 era) that I'd like to run Kubuntu on; howeversince the proc isn't even PAE Ubuntu is a PITA any way. But it's also got other issues (WiFi, 1.25GB RAM, etc)...I doubt I'll ever really get to revive it any more.
That said...from trying Kubuntu on an RPi2 and RPi3 (2GB RAM), and recently on a Pine64 (4GB RAM) Laptop :D...
4GB of RAM for KDE even with turning of nearly all effects tends to be a bit of a limiter unless you have a really good video card to go with it.It's not that it doesn't run - but things are a bit slow; Chrome/Firefox are nearly impossible, though rekonq is decent. So it comes down to the tools you want to use.
That said, Intel is still releasing 32-bit x86 CPUs - which I've pointed out in other forums (G+/Ubuntu) on this same question - and that's not necessarily embedded either.
$0.02
Ben
http://ark.intel.com/Search/FeatureFilter?productType=processors&FilterCurrentProducts=true&EM64=false&InstructionSet=32-bit

    On Sunday, July 2, 2017 9:43 PM, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
 

 There have been a few odd corner cases, but just about everything in userspace 
doesn't care if the kernel is 32 bit or 64 bit. People started running 64 bit 
kernels with 32 bit userspace fairly early on, and it's only gotten better.

The bigger reason for running 32 bit is that you are on either very old 
hardware, or an embedded system that's really small/cheap hardware.

I would question if anyone is running KDE/Kubuntu on new, small/cheap 32bit 
x86 hardware (there are a lot of people running on 32 bit ARM hardware)

But there are probably a lot of old laptops/desktops around that aren't 64 bit 
(but they are getting quite old by now). There are two questions about this 
hardware

1. is there enough of it to have kubuntu worry about it

2. is the performance of kubuntu on such limited hardware (memory and cpu) worth 
it.

Remember, we are talking about single-core system, most of which will only have 
a GB or two of ram (4G max except for corner cases that are messy to support)

Linux will continue to run on these systems, the question is if the KDE desktop 
will run in such limited resource environments.

David Lang

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