I've recently seen a trend in tech communities on lemmy where people have developed this mentality that computer hardware is as disposable as a compostable cup, and that after 10-15 years you should just chuck it in the bin and get something new. If someone asks for tech support, they'll just be told to buy new hardware. If someone is saddened their hardware is no longer supported by software they are just entitled, need to pull up their bootstraps, and "only" spend $100 to get something used that will also not be supported in 5 years. It doesn't matter if there is actual information out there that'll help them either. If the hardware is old, people will unanimously decide that nothing can be done.
I've seen this even in linux communities, what happened to people giving a damn about e-waste? Why is the solution always to just throw money at the problem? It's infuriating. I've half a mind to just block every tech/software community other than the ones on hexbear at this point.
FWIW this isnt hapenning right now. There is a gradual reorganization where 32bit i686 packages are being isolated. WoW Wine allows for emulating 32 bit packages using only 64 bit systems for example. Fedora will probably be the one to do this first, but this change is contingent on Steam (which is a 32 bit application on GNU and Windows).
There will always be specialized distributions that will always cater to 32 bit systems though. Also Debian is probably never going to drop i686 until it physically stops compiling.
Well, that's Debian for you. The whole point of it is that it'll run in situ forever.