Phasing out x86 architecture support in general

#1

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Due to the raise of interest on ARM technology among the developers and the community, we have decided to phase out the support of x86 architecture.

The decision means, that with the upcoming release of Manjaro v17.1 Hakoila we will only support ARM powered CPUs from then on. The next 6 months will be considered as the deprecation period, during which i686 and x86_64 will be still receiving upgraded packages. Starting from October 2017, packaging and repository tools will no longer require that from maintainers, effectively making i686 and x86_64 unsupported.

We had a long discussion with our sister project Manjaro-ARM, after they announced their shutdown. A hardware vendor luckly stepped up to provide our core development team with the needed hardware. This enables us to start developing more efficient and make this even possible.

Therefore we are glad to have the opportunity to keep the Manjaro-ARM project alive and concentrate mostly on this project as our main goal. We decided to support mainly ARM7 and ARM8 technologies, as those are the main processors our new main sponsor uses currently in their production use cases. With Plasma-Mobile also in mind, we will soon provide our simplicity concept to you also on mobile devices like tablets or phones.

We all hope our community will understand this decision and will spread the word to everyone who may not yet found out about the Manjaro project.

kind regards

Philip Müller and the Manjaro Development Team

Quelle