The bit-rot of 32bit Linux
Interest of software developers in the use of their product on 32bit Operating Systems has been declining for years. Build tests are only done on 64bit OS’es nowadays. For obvious reasons: there are not so many computers left in the Western world that only support 32bit software. The thing is, there’s still a lot of old computer hardware in use outside of the wealthy West. Slackware is one of the few remaining Linux distros where the 32bit flavor is just as relevant as the 64bit variant. Yes, you may question the value of running really new software on really old hardware, but I think that is the users’ choice and if you happen to live in a country where a 2025 computer amounts to a year of salary, then I would want also those people to enjoy modern software and security patches.
I can’t recall how many patches have been needed to make source code compile on 32bit Slackware for instance, but in most cases there would be a way to patch the source or circumvent the error. Patrick Volkerding does this for the distro core and I do something similar for the packages in my own repository. And we sigh and complain to each other when compilations fail due to the restrictive 32bit address space, the inability to specify either “lib” or “lib64” as the LIBDIR, the use of architecture-specific assembly code and CPU instructions, etcetera.