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I'm going to stray from the question slightly in anticipation of installing a 32 bit OS this year.
We have a family general-use Chromebook, 32 bit ARM. Slackware looks like a good candidate to displace ChromeOS, if I can figure out how to load ARM 32 bit.
Why? Its ChromeOS won't receive updates after June. Not just no feature updates - no security updates either. I only bought it 3-1/2 years ago and it's still in good physical shape, it bothers me to throw away things that are still useful, but I don't want an OS that won't get security updates.
I guess it was already an "old" model when I bought it. That is, old in Chromebook years - I since found it that it's normal for Google to stop supporting Chromebooks 6-1/2 years after launch. No more Chromebooks for this family.
I still have a dedicated install of 14.1 32 bit on it's own partition, and though I rarely boot it anymore, I do miss it's simplicity. I find Multilib a PITA and find myself grousing that I don't recall such jumping through hoops to go from 8 to 16, or 16 to 32. It doesn't help that 64bit is still not appreciably higher performance than 32bit for most operations. I know it makes for better performance to not have to deal with that whole layer of accommodation/translation, but transitions are just painful. I'll be really glad when everything is 64bit and 128bit is still decades in the future.
I guess that in an Intel Celeron 2.40 GHz, 2 GB ram and 20 GB HDD hard disk, home PC, choices are limited.
Slackware 14.2, 32bit (without kde and kdei packages) with WindowMaker works great as a home server (nextcloud and prosody xmpp).
Works even greater for learning purposes (fighting with drupal 8 right now).
If you ask me, there is no useless computer machine, 'till you try linux on it (preferably Slackware).
My oldest PC is 32-bits. It has been relegated to the closet. I keep it as a spare. I figure there is no urgency in getting rid of a laptop (unlike the old desktop PCs with CRT monitors that took up too much space).
I'm running Slackware Current 32-bits on a old desktop PC (circa 2004). It's only console mode (no Xorg). It's a sandbox where I can test server services (NFS, FTP server). For example, I'm currently using it as a backup server (rsync over ssh).
Er, sort of? It's a Slackware 64 system but I then used AlienBob's tools to get multilib by putting in bits from Slackware 32. Had to do this for Wine, for gaming and to run some older programs.
I'm curious to hear from people running 32-bit rather than 64-bit and why.
I've got a more then 10 years old HP Core 2 Duo machine with 4GB of RAM.
So applications won't have more then 4 GB available anyway and everything I want can be done within that amount (with the 32-bit PAE kernel).
So I never saw the need to update this machine from 32-bit Slackware.
PS: the machine originally had been installed with 12.2 as that's what I was using on my inherited AMD machine. It has been updated now to a stable 14 version, but - as I said - still the 32-bit version. I _do_ have a lot of 32-bit applications left from older times.
For instance I'm still using acroread, which doesn't come in 64-bit versions (and is closed source, so you cannot recompile it either).
So when I would change TO 64 I still would need multi-lib support to support those applications. It just isn't worth my time to do so.
PS2: my still older PIII of course is running Slackware 32-bit too.
Just installed current on an Acer Aspire One, manufactured 2009. Its handy as a backup if big box is down, I also take it out to the shop sometimes and its handy for checking mail and news on a trip.
Same here, running Slackware 14.2 on an Intel Atom N270 netbook that doesn't want to die. Additionally, I'm running Slackware -current ARM on a bunch of Raspberry Pi2B boards.
I use 32-bit Slackware 14.2 on my primary computer, because it has a 32-bit single core processor (ASUS EeePC 1005HAB) (Atom N270). :-)
I am slowly working on a replacement for the above computer. This replacement is a few years younger and is reported to have significantly better battery life. It has a 64-bit dual core processor, but the manufacturer set a flag in the BIOS to disable the 64-bit mode, and so I have put 32-bit Slackware 14.2 on it.
I have an Asus EeePC, with Slackware 14.2 installed, that I used as a server for my custom package repository in my home network. At some point I made the virtual machine where I build the packages run as a server, so the EeePC is in the closet.
I use Slackware 32bit
1) Core2 (2GB ram), AMD4550b (2GB ram) - some software need 32bit (and I not like multilibs), but plan to upgrade to 64bit,
2) Asus PC eee 4G (630Mhz, 1GB ram, 3,6GB ssd) - 32bit only - works fine, sse2 ready, to fit the drive I use btrfs compression + separate /boot. palemoon-32 so-so usable, have a problem with any video chat I have tried, even it work's, it lags, also many of chats require big bowser (chrome).
3) PIII-733Mhz (512Mb ram, 40GB hdd) - 32bit only - sse only, have a problem with Firefox, Midori and other big browsers which are sse2 optimized. And even opera-legacy 12.16, palemoon-sse running, but very slow - It seems to me that browsers/OS now totally unoptimized for sse arch, the same situation on Debian. Dillo, Lynx, Netsurf - work fine, but ugly.
Posting off a Thinkpad T42 that requires a non-PAE kernel. Has Slackware 14.2 32 bit installed and lilo.conf points to vmlinuz-huge. I update and boot this thing every couple of months and think if it needs recycling or not, then just put it back on the shelf. It runs xfce4 with 1Gb RAM and the original 40Gb hard drive. The screen is bright and clear and the keyboard is firm and responsive which is why I hang on to it.
I also happen to have a 32 bit install of 14.2 on my workhorse Thinkpad X61s. That machine is 64bit capable but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not going to touch that install until 15 is out for a few months.
My Thinkpad L440 runs Slackware current pure 64 bit. I don't think I'm going to need multilib functionality for my very basic computing needs (default install + openoffice basically).
Last edited by keithpeter; 02-25-2020 at 12:52 PM.
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