Re:Future of 32-bit platform support in FreeBSD
by zozbot234 on Tuesday February 20, 2024 @09:41AM
(#39441863)
Debian is moving their 32-bit releases to 64-bit time, it's a big transition but it's expected to be ready for the next release. But they've also announced that they may be forced to drop their i686 release quite soon.
Wine is going to stop being an issue somewhat soon. The Wine developers are adapting it to work more like Windows, by making even 32-bit applications call the 64-bit libraries.
I expect that, not long after Wine switches to always using 64-bit libraries, distributions (probably starting with faster-moving ones like Fedora) will completely (or almost completely, leaving only glibc and its dependencies) drop the 32-bit libraries. And we're already close to the Y2038 deadline, which gives distributions another incentive to drop 32-bit libraries (instead of having to go through a migration to the 64-bit time API, similar to the migration to 64-bit file offsets we had some time ago).