2021-11-17, 04:26 PM
I agree, 32 bits is a dead-end road for desktop and laptops and even other embedded systems like Raspberry but Raspberry is a special case.
Raspberry community is huge and you can find tons of blog posts, forums, tutorials, manuals... we have fed from these sources to learn and create OpenPlotter. But Raspberry org is not Debian or Ubuntu, they can not maintain 32 and 64 OS, they have to focus on just one. Dropping support for 32bit and focusing on 64bit has a high price to pay for little performance to be gained. The environmental consequences and the loss of community support are reasons enough to stick to 32bit in my humble opinion.
Maybe the problem is that we are using Raspberries in our boats and it is not what they were created for. They were created to empowering young people in impoverished countries. Maybe we should start using other OS for Raspberry or even use another hardware but I do not think OpenPlotter would exist on that context because I do not think the community would be big enough to feed a project like OpenPlotter with modest resources.
We will see what finally happens, I think that keeping an eye on the evolution of other systems is a good solution at this time. Having a robust OpenPlotter image under Ubuntu as the official image would be good for everyone but the way to get there can be difficult, or maybe not, we will see...
Raspberry community is huge and you can find tons of blog posts, forums, tutorials, manuals... we have fed from these sources to learn and create OpenPlotter. But Raspberry org is not Debian or Ubuntu, they can not maintain 32 and 64 OS, they have to focus on just one. Dropping support for 32bit and focusing on 64bit has a high price to pay for little performance to be gained. The environmental consequences and the loss of community support are reasons enough to stick to 32bit in my humble opinion.
Maybe the problem is that we are using Raspberries in our boats and it is not what they were created for. They were created to empowering young people in impoverished countries. Maybe we should start using other OS for Raspberry or even use another hardware but I do not think OpenPlotter would exist on that context because I do not think the community would be big enough to feed a project like OpenPlotter with modest resources.
We will see what finally happens, I think that keeping an eye on the evolution of other systems is a good solution at this time. Having a robust OpenPlotter image under Ubuntu as the official image would be good for everyone but the way to get there can be difficult, or maybe not, we will see...