Debian appears to have dropped 32 bit kernel builds

[asqwerth]

All these suggestions of posting EOL warnings to potential Debian 32-bit users seem to be something the proposers should be bringing to Debian's attention. Just writing about it in this thread isn't going to get anywhere, in my opinion.

My current oldest computer is a ASUS laptop from 2010, and it's 64-bit.

My 32-bit Pentium PC died in end 2014.

For my replacement PC -- my current desktop -- I certainly wasn't going back to 32-bit. I was unable to test Solus (then called EvolveOS) on the old machine because even then, more than 10 years ago, they did not make 32-bit versions of their distro.

When I consider the distros that were on my old PC, apart from MX (MX14 at that time), I think the rest either no longer exist or no longer support 32-bit (Manjaro, PCLinuxOS).

32-bit support has been dwindling for a long time, and I suspect 32-bit users themselves are very much aware of it.

[Arnox]

I don't get it, what do they need to know about? What kind of decision do they need to make?

Since Debian has such long security support cycles, this issue is definitely mitigated a lot. Nevertheless, I'm imagining there might be some businesses that are still running the latest Debian on 32-bit hardware for whatever reason, but simply thought that the Debian team ceasing x86 support would first be done with more "loudness" so to speak, and so, put off transitioning away from x86. You know how some businesses are. Waiting until the right mood takes them, which is last-minute panic. Beyond that, I can't think of any other urgent examples, but I can think of other less urgent ones where potential users go to download the latest version of Debian because they heard Debian is one of the few distros left that still natively support x86 only to find with Debian 13 that x86 is no longer supported. End of the world? No, of course not. But still an unpleasant surprise. Also, perhaps less applicable, but other distro maintainers like Q4OS may depend on Debian to build x86 kernels only to suddenly find that Debian 13 will not support x86 anymore. Now, distro maintainers are probably going to be more up on Linux news than others for sure, but it seems, unless I'm much mistaken, that this change even caught one or a couple maintainers here off-guard as well, not to mention the distro maintainers of MX respins perhaps wanting the x86 kernel too.

All these suggestions of posting EOL warnings to potential Debian 32-bit users seem to be something the proposers should be bringing to Debian's attention. Just writing about it in this thread isn't going to get anywhere, in my opinion.

Yeah, honestly, I was content after the thread I made to leave it be, but then I saw this thread and decided to contribute more of my thoughts.