14 DAY TRIAL // Linux distros have started to phase out support for 32-bit processors a while back, although the big names aren't doing this yet. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and most of the big ones still provide support for them, although it's starting to take a toll. Fedora is a good example, and one of the developers has explained why it's actually causing them problems.
Fedora is one of the big distros out there, and its developers are aware of the impact of their work. To many users, putting the 32-bit platform on a backburner might not seem like a big deal, but there are still quite a few users out there who use this kind of processors. The problem is that we don't really know how many people are still downloading and installing 32-bit distros in a way that's meaningful for the majority of devs.
The Fedora team knows how many 32-bit downloads they have, and it's not a lot, so when you have an upstream bug that's affecting the kernel for the 32-bit version of the distro and keeps everyone in place, you start to question if the platform is still relevant.
Bugs for 32-bit platform wouldn't stop the entire project
Fedora developer Josh Boyer went to the mailing list and explained why he believed that making a decision about 32-bit machines was important at this time and how it would affect them going forward.
"Perhaps it is time that we evaluate where i686 stands in Fedora more closely. For a starting suggestion, I would recommend that we do not treat it as a release blocking architecture. This is not the same as demotion to secondary architecture status. That has broader implications in both buildsys and ecosystem. My suggestion is narrowly focused so that builds still proceed as today, but if there is something broken for i686 it does not block the release of whatever milestone we are pursuing," said Josh.
As you can see, Fedora is not proposing dropping the 32-bit images altogether, but it would be a good idea to make some changes that wouldn't let them get stuck if anything were to happen with that platform.