On Sep 8, 2014 8:56 AM, "Owen Taylor" <otaylor@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2014-09-05 at 17:52 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> > On 09/05/2014 05:49 PM, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> > >
> > > Yes, but you're getting that memory back "free" by the extra address space
> > > opened up on x86_64. Look at your free space numbers. You're given, albeit
> > > small, more free memory on x86_64.
> >
> > Well I just realized you're talking about 2GB here, but with low RAM prices and
> > systems coming with 4GB standard I don't think 2GB is a fair starting point.
>
> We decided in the last workstation WG IRC meeting that we're going to
> list the RAM requirements as "2GB or more". Yes, 4GB (or more) is the
> reasonable configuration for our target users, in these days of $10/GB
> memory, but:
>
>  * Allocating more than 2GB to a VM on a 4GB system is difficult.
>
>  * There are some people who have old systems that, for whatever reason,
>    would be hard to increase the memory on.
>
>  * Listing our memory requirements as 4GB sounds like Fedora is much
>    more memory intensive than competitors, and it isn't.
>
> So, given that, the question I was trying to answer is whether if
> someone is trying to use Fedora Workstation on an actual 2GB system,
> whether using i686 is an advantage. The answer seems to be that if you
> are actually using Fedora day-to-day on such a system (not doing a quick
> test in a VM), then you would be better off using i686.
>
Since no one mentioned this, perhaps for good reason, I thought I'd bring up the possibility of supporting x32 instead of i686.
IMHO, however, RAM isn't going to be a concern for the majority of the target audience.