If a separate arch/repo is going to be set up, perhaps it would be wiser to go straight for v3? May yield even better results and eliminates the need to bump the version after a few years. Since people have a choice, there is no risk of leaving v1 and v2 users behind. If there is going to be a “hard bump” in requirements, giving no option to use older hardware, I would like to point out that there are a few issues. • Somewhere in the thread it was mentioned that we’re talking about CPUs older than 15 years. Mine (E5300) is Q4 2008 and it is v1, with the highest point in sales occurring even later: I bought it around 2010 and it was by no means considered “old” at the time. That means machines not older than 10 years are being eliminated. • I see surprisingly many people claim they do not support v2. It’s hardly reliable data, but it suggests that such a change is closer to kicking out 1/4 of the user base than “unimportant” 1%. • So far no hard data to support the change, in particular one that would outweigh the downsides. It’s undeniable that tuning for newer CPUs increases performance in *some* software. But not only users of such programs, if they care about speed, compile them themselves; but — more importantly — that type of software does not represent the typical user experience. To argue such a change makes sense, one has to either provide data showing improvement, that is both statistically significant and noticeable, or the gain would have to be so huge that no further testing is needed (e.g. 50% increase in speed). For a typical user, not some selected pieces of software or synthetic tests. So far the only arguments I hear are “because it’s newer” and, in this thread, that someone believes the battery life got extended (though by unknown factor and that only applies to laptops). Wasn’t the latest mkinitcpio move to zstd enough of a warning? • The change forces throwing away perfectly good hardware. Sure, abandoning 686 did the same, but then it was a question of maintaining a separate architecture, the arguments were very strong and in the end 686 users would be left behind anyway with or without Arch’s move to x86_64 only. In here we’re talking only about unquantified performance and battery life improvement. I believe that a separate arch/repo would be a better idea.