Fedora 31

Mayank Sharma may have upgraded his workstation to get this as soon as it was released, but did it live up to expectations?

- Mayank Sharma

With the release of Fedora 31, the distro becomes the latest addition to the list of projects that have officially dropped support for the 32-bit architecture. The lack of any blowback, unlike Ubuntu’s poorly managed announcement, tells us that a majority of users don’t use 32-bit machines as their main desktop, and even if they do they empathise with the decision that maintaining 32-bit is a distraction. The project had relegated the 32-bit Fedora kernel to the community for maintenance for a couple of years now, where it was stagnating and gathering bugs that no one was interested in fixing. So the team floated the idea of dropping the 32-bit build once again, and this time there were no objections.

Unlike Canonical’s announcement (and subsequent reversal) to axe all 32-bit packages, Fedora has made it clear right from the get-go that it wasn’t dropping all 32-bit packages. The distro will make sure that the most popular 32-bit packages, including Multilib, Wine and