Is 32-bit obsolete?

[bnemias]

I use both, extensively. My main machine is 64-bit running devuan. Prior to that, I ran 64 bit XP since 2009, so I am no stranger to 64-bit. However, the only reason I ran 64 bit was because of chess. The fact is I no longer care about getting the maximum possible nps, and as such, there is no other compelling software that I run requiring 64-bit.

This machine does have 8G of RAM, so 64bit does make sense. But I also make heavy use of 32bit XP and Linux. I have two athlon-xp (no sse2!) that regularly see use when I have people over to play networked games. We play Starcraft, NOLF, doom/doom2, duke nukem. Lots of old school stuff that we find much better than the new junk, and the old machines run all this with ease regardless of OS.

And that's just on the desktop. I run probably a dozen embedded devices for various things. All of them are 32bit. 3 play chess on FICS 24/7, the rest are doing various home networking tasks. My main server is a kirkwood device (1.2 Ghz Armv5) with 128 MB of ram! I am amazed every time I shell into it to see how much free resources it has, and usually the load is something near 0. It runs my webserver, my email server, inadyn, samba (file sharing) and cups (printer sharing), tftpd, dovecot, and pihole.

[pijl]

Two weeks ago I revived three old netbooks (Intel Atom) that belonged to my daughters and installed Xubuntu on it. Works perfectly. Just not with 64-bits programs
Baron participated to the monthly HGM tourney on one of these machines with a windows compile + wine. I could have made a native Linux compile, but was too lazy to do that
I had not made 32-bits compiles in a year or more so getting a recent Baron on 32-bits took some effort as well.

[cdani]

I think 32 bit users are enough to continue doing 32 bit versions, at least I will do for Andscacs.