Reducing the amount of i386 Live images for bullseye
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.
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