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flyinghead / flycast

Flycast is a multiplatform Sega Dreamcast, Naomi, Naomi 2 and Atomiswave emulator
GNU General Public License v2.0
1.28k stars 161 forks source link

Add a 32-bit AppImage Script for Linux #1539

Closed ghost closed 1 month ago

ghost commented 1 month ago

I am proposing to add a 32-bit AppImage script for a 32-bit version of Flycast.

flyinghead commented 1 month ago

Thank you for this contribution but x86 is a dead platform. All major linux distros as well as Windows have dropped support for it. I plan to stop supporting it at some point too so I'd rather not start providing builds for it now. Also note that renaming make-appimage.sh would break linux x64 CI builds.

However I am very open to other contributions. You can look at enhancement requests in the Issues list for ideas and don't hesitate to contact me for questions.

ghost commented 1 month ago

This program is well optimized and should work well on some 32-bit systems. Debian still supports 32-bit. Linux Mint, one of the most popular Linux distros, still supports 32-bit. There is a fork of Arch Linux that is 32-bit and it is still maintained. There are also a variety of lightweight distros that still support 32-bit.

The number of people is small in comparison to 64-bit, but there are still thousands, tens of thousands, or more that could benefit from a 32-bit version. Millions of 32-bit machines were made and a portion of them are still being utilized. I also think it might look good for the project that the program will operate on old 32-bit computers as well as new 64-bit computers.

Windows 10 support will be stopping next year and Windows 11 does not have a 32-bit version. The number of Linux 32-bit users might increase over the next two years. I can help provide 32-bit versions if you would like.

I will rename "make-appimage_64-bit.sh" back to "make-appimage.sh" in the pull request.