Former archlinux developer here (maintained the haskell stack, coq, built an aur git repo, math packages, created 100s of packages, etc.), I think that this is a good thing:<p>I never used i686 even though I built for it.<p>The way I built packages was on my local laptop (clean chroot). Building for 2 separate architectures involves building 2 separate packages. This doubles the time it takes for a developer to build. This might not be that bad for smaller packages, but ghc (haskell compiler) took a long time on my computer. This means that if it takes an hour to build ghc, it would take 2 hours of my time to actually build ghc for both platforms. When you're talking about 100s of packages built many times over several years, this quickly adds up.<p>The other benefit from removing i686 support is that the packages built for that architecture were never really tested by developers. I ran x86_64 10 years ago, tested the x86_64 version of my packages, and most of the time pushed them directly to the main repositories if everything checked out. For more critical packages, I would push them to testing, let people report any issues, and then move them after a couple of days. This means that I never knew if i686 broke or not. This was the case with most of the developers at the time.