In order to clean up the i686 (x86 or 32-bit) packages that are no longer needed in Linux, the developers on the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee are launching an extensive survey of the community. Apparently, this move was inspired by an earlier discussion on whether to drop OpenJDK i686 legacy for Fedora 37 and later, so FESCo also wanted to know what people are still doing with i686 packages.
By eliminating build packs that are no longer widely used, the workload on maintainers can be significantly reduced and other resources freed up. If all goes well, we’ll be able to see the latest results of cleaning up the i686 packages on Fedora 37, which is scheduled to arrive later this year.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents indicated that they are still keeping i686 packages for Valve’s Steam client and Wine runtime. Others are to facilitate testing on outdated 32-bit Linux packages such as older versions of Adobe Acrobat/Adobe Air.