> i386 is no longer supported as a regular architecture: there is no official kernel and no Debian installer for i386 systems. The i386 architecture is now only intended to be used on a 64-bit (amd64) CPU. Users running i386 systems should not upgrade to trixie. Instead, Debian recommends either reinstalling them as amd64, where possible, or retiring the hardware.
Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!
OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.
Hopefully i386 (or perhaps a new i386-like port with added support for 64-bit time values) can move to the unofficial Debian Ports infrastructure for Debian 14 (forky) or Debian 15 (duke). Debian Ports has a m68k port, so supporting one for i386 shouldn't be a huge problem.
To what end? Outside of sheer nostalgia if you are running ancient hardware, you probably have a bespoke application which requires that environment. Either you cannot change for hard technical, compliance, or just fear of the unknown. Firewall it from the internet and continue to run whatever release last worked.
I am not happy about unnecessary ewaste, but an i386 almost certainly has and order of magnitude less horsepower than a raspberry pi or N100.
Debian's tagline is the "universal operating system". It's a distribution with active ports on a very large number of architectures [1], even incredibly obscure ones.
The goal of universal compatibility that separates the Debian project from commercial software and even other open-source projects.
The legacy x86 architecture is still far more popular than some that platforms that Debian advertises as having official support for and there has been x86 based processors manufactured for niche applications until recently, eg, AMD Geode and others.
I find it really unfortunate Debian Project is removing official support for new x86 installations. The silver lining is it seems like they'll be an unofficial port and it's likely niche distributions like MX Linux and AntiX will maintain their own builds.
It would be ideal if open-source can develop stronger mechanims to keep support for the large numbers of these relatively niche architectures (eg, through increased usage of emulation over real hardware).
My Linux machine is very modern, but I still need i386 architecture support installed, because Steam requires 32-bit support. And Steam requires 32-bit support so people can play 15-year-old games.
(Admittedly, the 32-bit support Ubuntu ships is less than a full OS and you can't install Ubuntu on a 32-bit machine these days)
Debian is doing basically the same thing Ubuntu is with regards to i386. Packages are still being built for the architecture, but i386 systems aren't supported, and there's no 32-bit kernel package.
According to Passmark the Pentinum 4 1.3Ghz is 55 times slower than a Raspberry Pi 5, so I'd guess it's at least two orders of magnitude. The original Pi is 16 times faster than a P4 1.3Ghz...
You can recycle e-waste (and yes, I know SOME e-waste ends up in China/India/etc. Not all does.)
The e-waste is of substantially less concern than the massive difference in carbon footprint from power consumption.
The i386 architecture hasn't been dropped, it is still available in the archives to support 32-bit applications. The major change is that there no longer is a 32-bit kernel in the archive (the package linux-image-686 is no more). But most packages are still available in their i386 versions:
If the official i386 arch was built with instructions that your hardware doesn't support, tough cookies
While theoretically possible, that would only happen on processors older than 30 years. Debian's i386 architecture still uses -march=i686 as its baseline compiler target, which is the venerable Pentium Pro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6_(microarchitecture)
Not sure why you are downvoted, I guess people don't believe this is true. To confirm: The AMD Geode LX was a <5W 32-bit x86 processor which did not support SSE instructions, and is therefore not fully i686 compatible. According to Wikipedia, it was produced until 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd_geode#AMD_Geode
It was used in the OLPC XO-1. The Cisco ASA line of firewalls also used Geode processors at least at some point in its lifetime.
Much of that information has to do with creating a new hardware port from scratch. The i386 support just needs to be "demoted" to the Debian ports infrastructure once it's officially scheduled to get dropped from the main Debian repository (which could well happen starting either in Debian forky or duke), and this can probably be done with some special handling.
(Answering the "to what end?" question, a lot of 32bit-only hardware is still available and dirt cheap in the second-hand market (e.g. early "netbooks"), much of it quite well-built and enjoyable to use. While such hardware can no longer realistically browse the "modern" web, it can still find a lot of use for more lightweight tasks, including acting as a "thin client" for more powerful machines.)
Well, the existing i386 port is going to remain as-is for supporting old software (especially games) (but the CPU baseline will likely get increased), it isn't going to be removed, so you would need a new architecture for 32bit-only hardware.
Since i386 is not going to do the 2038 transition either (since that would break the ABI), also you would need to either make a new ABI for the new port, or do the 2038 transition for it too.
Over time more and more 32-bit bugs will get introduced, so there will be lots of maintenance work to do too.
I had seen conflicting information about this, though nothing official. I suppose we'll know more once some actual release planning happens for forky, which might take some time.
When distros mention i386 support they often actually refer to i586 or i686, yes.
True i386 support would mean compatible with the original Intel 386 processor from 1985. The 486 added a few additional instructions in 1989 but things really changed with the Pentium in 1993 - that gave us i586 which is the bare minimum for most modern software today. Much software can still run on regular Pentiums today if compiled for it, but SSE2 optimizations requires at least a Pentium 4 or Core CPUs instead.
I play with retro PCs often and found OpenBSD's i386 target stopped supporting real 386 CPUs after the 4.1 release, and dropped support for i486 somewhat recently in 6.8. It now requires at least a Pentium class CPU, i586, though the arch is still referred to as i386 likely because it's a common proxy for "32-bit".
Debian 3.0 was the last version that ran on the 80386 processor proper, but even as the CPU requirements for the "i386" architecture moved up to the 486, then Pentium, then Pentium II, the name stuck around. Partly from inertia, partly to not break the entire existing mirror infrastructure.
Yes, 386 and 486 stayed relevant throughout the 90s because the price tag for new shiny processors is always higher, and it was not uncommon for customers to favor more or faster RAM/Disk space/graphic card/sound card (that was a thing back then) over better-looking CPU benchmarks.
The Linux kernel also requires at least i486 now. AIUI that decision had to do with smoothing out multicore/SMP support - which is a bit silly because no real 80386 systems in common use are even SMP, let alone multicore. But anyway.
Linux ran fine on 386 chips - that was actually what it was originally developed on. But Intel added a bunch of functionality in the 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro chips. At some point the powers that be didn't see any value in continuing to support pre-P6 chips anymore.
It was a bit of a strange decision since there were undoubtedly more 386, 486, and Pentium users than some of the platforms Linux continued to support, but that's the choice they made. But they weren't alone. Even NetBSD requires a 486DX or better.
Freexian is for-profit, and all the LTS/ELTS contributors are Debian maintainers, and LTS is part of Debian, while ELTS is publicly available too, but in an external archive.
Ah, they advertised non-profit at one point, but I see that's changed. That may have been "we seek no profit" not "non-profit entity". Thanks for the info on this point.
Back to LTS:
Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian Security and Release teams, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
To the point, Freexian is 100% not Debian, not "part" of Debian, it merely uses Debian's infra gratis for LTS. This does not detract from the good work they do, but we must also not confuse a private company, and its goals, with Debian and its goals.
LTS tries its best, but only supports what it can. Not its fault. Thus they do give preference to packages which are more widely used, and which they have received donations for.
So wildly popular things such as apache2, mariadb, and so on are very much going to be handled. Some rare package which has 400 users worldwide? Not so much.
LTS will very much take patches and any help, but that still ties in to the number of users. If a packages has 400 users worldwide, and most have moved on to the next release? Well, I hope you see my point.
(I've moved customers off of LTS for using rare packages, whilst reassuring them that LAMP servers are very much supported due to this. Popularity counts here, due to efforts of volunteers and externals.)
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ELTS only supports a further subset of packages. It's not "full" support. I think one would be exceptionally unwise to use it, for say a desktop. That is, unless they were paying for support and had obtained a list of all packages supported.
"Note that when you request a quote, we send you back a list of packages that are not supported or that have limitations in their support so that you can take an informed decision."
Yes, I know that page has a git repo and so on for some support information.
But my points are; not the full distro is supported, you have to track this yourself, you need to be diligent, and even so you need to be sure you're not running rarer packages.
Once again, I do want to reiterate, these are both excellent programs. They do a good job, they're dedicated, but we must be aware of the limitations here.
An example being the differences between security support for main, non-free, contrib in stable Debian:
As you can see, there is no actual guaranteed security support for contrib and non-free. The reasons are logical, however, users need to be aware of the nuance here.
Just as they need to be aware of the nuance of LTS and ELTS.
For example, all of my server installs have non-free, non-free-firmware and contrib blocked via pinning in preferences.d, with only specific absolutely required packages then allowed back in.
(For example I may allow command line apps, but not anything network connected, and only with a once over of functionality and SUID bits and other such things)
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Really, I see LTS as a crutch that normal users should never use. I suggest we collectively not encourage Desktop users (for example) to use LTS.
The LTS/Freexian people are all Debian members/contributors, so I would not say "Freexian is 100% not Debian" is correct. Basically, some Debian folks got together and started a company to get funding to do an LTS, and also offer other paid services.
At least for bullseye, the LTS team supposedly support all packages, except for games and a few other packages. Its trivial to find out which packages aren't supported too, just run a command, no need to email anyone.
Agreed on the rest, although do note LTS contributors are paid, the security team probably aren't (although some are).
I think in practice, when contrib/non-free stuff has security updates from upstreams, Debian does get updates in stable/LTS. For example the Intel microcode, or WiFi firmware.
I too feel like Debian having LTS is a waste of time, people should be able to upgrade to the next stable within the one year of regular security support for oldstable.
BTW, Ubuntu security support has a similar issue; main is supported, universe is not.
Yep! I did some testing and found 6.8 was the final version to support 486 CPUs. The reason is the OpenBSD project switched to clang for the compiler in 6.9, and in the process became dependent on Pentium instructions.
However, that doesn't stop one from installing a Pentium Overdrive in an old Socket 3 board and running the latest release. ;)
Hahah yeah, it's just a for fun/hobby PC. It's pretty beefy for what it is - 1.3GHz, 512MB RAM, 512GB SSD on a SATA card, fast AGP card. I can run a Debian desktop at 1080p on here.
Impressive that i386 support made it all the way to August 2025. I have Debian 10 Buster running on a Pentium 3 which only EOL'd last year in June 2024. It's still useful on that hardware and I'm grateful support continued as long as it did!
OpenBSD still supports i386 for those looking for a modern OS on old 32-bit hardware.