32-bit support (will continue) with Nextcloud 26

[tflidd]

@pultis

I’m a little bit shocked that Nextcloud has not been tested on 32 bit systems at all. For such widely used software and from a QA engineer’s point of view, this is difficult to understand and irresponsible. The website describes that Nextcloud “scales from a Raspberry Pi with 2 users to globally distributed installations”.

Untested software should never be distributed. I wish it would have been mentioned in the Administration Manual earlier (has been added after Oct 22).

There was quite some testing of NC25 with a lot support from the community here, e.g. Fourth Beta of Nextcloud 25
but there are so many systems out there, that it is impossible to test everything. I don’t know if there are raspberry testers and if they use 32/64 bit environments.

@e-raser

Unfortunately that will still cost me roughly 3 to 4 full days including migration planning and testing before

At some point, you want to upgrade the underlying system as well which will take additional time. And with 1 year announcement, it should be possible to upgrade to a new OS and migrate your Nextcloud to it. I’d happily invest that time rather than knowing to get strange bugs at some random point with a 32-bit OS.

@zeekoe

the environmental cost of software-based obsolence is much too big already. Every machine replaced, is a new machine needing to be built from the already scarce resources of our earth.

I am very happy with Nextcloud as-is. I run it happily on this small machine now for exactly 6 years, and if it weren’t for security issues that could arise with dropped support, I would run it for 5-10 more years on this machine for sure.

Good point. On the other hand it is hard to develop software that is compatible with all the platforms … and how many are really stuck on 32-bit systems (25% of 31 voters: 32-bit Support is no longer available from Nextcloud. What are the Takeaways?)? And how long will they still run? Perhaps they can still serve as backup machine or something.