32-bit or 64-bit?
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Whonix ™ 64bit builds.
From Whonix ™ 14 onward, only 64-bit builds are available for download.
32-bit builds are unsupported.
See also System Requirements.
[1] This decision is based on several factors:
- Distributions are increasingly dropping support for 32-bit systems (including Debian). [2]
- Only a small minority of users are stuck with older hardware that will not support 64-bit builds. [3]
- It is a significant maintenance burden for Whonix ™ to maintain both 32-bit and 64-bit builds. [4]
- Users could attempt to build a 32-bit version of Whonix ™ from source code, by appending the Whonix ™ build script parameter
--arch i386
. - Statistics: https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/8183
- Forum Discussion: https://forums.whonix.org/t/state-of-offical-64-bit-builds
- See additional information in the footnote. [5]
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑
https://phabricator.whonix.org/T91
- ↑
- ↑
For example in Tails
, less than 10% of users had 32-bit kernels in late 2016.
- ↑ That is, Whonix ™ would need to maintain 10 images instead of the current 6 images.
- ↑ Previously, Non-Qubes-Whonix 13 users (deprecated
) who relied on 32-bit (i686) hardware were still able to use Whonix ™ 14 by using the upgrade instructions. This was because none of the Whonix ™ packages were made 64-bit only. A similar procedure is no longer possible, but interested readers can refer to this phabricator entry
and forum post
.

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