What is the collective view about supporting 32-bit AppImages? Are 32-bit AppImages still being offered or do we assume the world has moved onto 64-bit?
It seems to be a lot of work to build a 32-bit AppImage as none of the pre-build AppImage tools can be used. Also, appimaged is only available pre-built in its 64-bit form.
I know that it is possible to build all the AppImage tools from source on a 32-bit machine but it turns out to be a lot of work and I failed at the last hurdle because AppImage kit required a newer version of cmake than available on the Debian oldstable VM that I was using.
So have developers largely dropped 32-bit AppImages now?
Frankly I would assume that the world has beyond 32 bit. Most computers within the last 10 years support 64-bit so I’m not really sure there is a driving need for 32 bit. That’s just my two cents.
I still work on some 32bit systems running lubuntu on armv7l. But I’ve never looked for or tried an AppImage on them either. But I’m new to using AppImage, now I’m tempted to try…
Now I think about it I know that there are lots of old Windows laptops that are brought back to life by installing a lightweight Linux distro on them and many of these could be 32-bit. So maybe 32-bit support will linger on a bit longer.
Actually producing 32-bit AppImages is not as bad as I thought and it is only really linuxdeployqt that is not available pre-built in 32-bit form. I had not even thought about making AppImages for ARM processors…
The Open Build Service had the AppImage tools such as appimagetool and appimaged for Intel 64-bit, Intel 32-bit, ARM 64-bit, and ARM 32-bit the last time I’ve checked.
This is simply amazing. Hi @probono I just made my account here tonight and this is my first comment. I really like the idea to maintain 32-bit AppImages. Thanks for everything and this friendly forum.