Hi Live team For a while, the discussions have popped up whether we still want or need i386 desktop live images. Building all those images and testing them at a regular basis (sometimes regular as in, every few months) and also at release time is quite tedious, and they're pretty much useless compared to the amd64 images on any computer from the last 5 years (yes, that crappy Atom cpu laptop that is locked to 32 bit is older than 5 years already).
I believe that at least the KDE and Gnome i386 images aren't that useful. You need a reasonably beefy computer with enough memory to run those, and at that point you might as well use the amd64 media. Since many other distributions are making the jump to dropping i386 installation media entirely, I think that it's a good idea to keep some live media around for one more release, as long as bullseye continues to make it easy to do so. This will make it possible for users with 32-bit hardware (who probably mostly uses it for hobby/specialist reasons by the time bullseye is released) to continue using it for a few more years on a supported linux system. At DebConf we discussed this for a bit too, where I said I'd take it to the debian-live list for some additional feedback. Here is the list of our current i386 images: * debian-live-i386-cinnamon * debian-live-i386-gnome * debian-live-i386-kde * debian-live-i386-lxde * debian-live-i386-lxqt * debian-live-i386-mate * debian-live-i386-standard * debian-live-i386-xfce I propose: * At the minimum, dropping: cinnamon, gnome and kde * Keep at least standard and one of the lighter desktop environments (perhaps lxqt? xfce?) I'm not sure where the best place is to draw the lines, but standard is very useful on old hardware since installing a headless/cli-only system using a live image is a lot easier on old hardware than installing every individual package using dpkg. And it seems worth while having one GUI system available too (if only to test things like whether the hardware even works on Debian, which I did recently on an old ThinkPad with S3 graphics). So, what I'm asking is, how far should we cut back? Is there any compelling reason at all to keep any of the 3 installation mediums I want to drop? Do we need more than one gui system? And if just one, any strong preference (along with reasons?). -Jonathan -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
