Are there ANY versions of Kicad that will run on an old 32 bit laptop that uses a Debian Bookworm distribution (Peppermint Linux). Thanks.
The problem is that Debian repos have old versions of KiCad, so flatpaks are recommended for Debian, but there are no 32-bit flatpaks as far as I can see.
This is just from a squiz, so Iām glad to be proved wrong.
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What processor does your laptop have? If it is either AMD or Intel, then it is unlikely that it does not support 64bit. For example even the AMD Opteron, released in 2003 (Yes, that is 20 years ago) supports 64 bit (and legacy 32bit applications).
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Itās an Intel Dual Core Pentium T2080. Iāve checked on Intels website and it says 32 bit. Looks like I may be out of luck.
Thatās around 16 years old. Probably time to get a new notebook. Many software is stopping 32 bit support.
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I was quite surprised to see that it apparently does not support 64Bits.
Even more surprised that it has a PassMark rating of 339
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/low_end_cpus.html
ā¦ and you find it still āusableā. I guess you are a patient person. 
My old DualCore had a PM rating of 1500 and was quite usable, but not very quick, and even though it was still perfectly usable, it went into the recyclebin when I got another pc for free with a PM rating of 3200. Two years ago I treated myself with an Ryzen 5600G (PM around 20000).
I guess there is some reason you are using such old hardware, but with that sort of vintage stuff it is becoming difficult to find people who are willing to put time into helping you. Maybe itās time to sniff around on the second hand market for something a bit newer?
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CAD programs were the āexcuseā I needed to upgrade to a faster machine. I think Iāve seen KiCad ported to Raspberry PI. Not sure how usable it is.
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This is just a free spare laptop I found at work. Itās NOT my main PC. It would just be nice if I could use it with Kicad. Itās not the end of the world if I canāt. Might have to try something else.
Because you apparently are very, very patient, you can try compiling KiCad. How to build KiCad on Linux (the easy way) Ā· Wiki Ā· eelik-kicad / kicad Ā· GitLab
EDIT: I donāt know which old version of KiCad your 32-bit distro has, so I donāt know how easy/difficult it is to hunt down the rest of the dependencies.
EDIT2: This depends on Peppermintās support for Debian repositories, I think. If you can add the normal Debian repository, you should be able to have KiCad 6 directly, and it should be possible to build 7 or even 7.99. Plus, v7 is in bookworm-backports.
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Being stuck on KiCad V5 because of a free laptop would not be my choice. KiCad V8 is expected next February and it has (again) lots of new nice features. I have not done any serious projects in KiCad V7, but I do notice that things are getting to work smoother over time, for example because the interactive router is being tweaked all the time.
I had a look at some online second hand store, and you can buy a 3rd gen i5 laptop for around EUR150. (For example i5-3320M with PassMark rating of 2657). Prices go up when hardware gets more modern and screens get bigger, but there is plenty of choice again. With the crazy virus of a few years ago even 2nd hand laptops were more difficult to obtain. Prices went up a lot and there was much less choice, but those days have past. There is now plenty of choice again for affordable prices.
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If you are that patient can you install another Linux distro on it? I havenāt checked if there are 32-bit builds of KiCad for Ubuntu or Fedora. But as said, 32-bit only PCs and software support are gradually vanishing.
Short answer: KiCad 6.0.11 is the last KiCad version that runs 32-bit. It is in the Debian repositories.
After version 6, we retired the 32-bit patches that were needed for some floating point calculations and increased usage of large integer math that was prohibitively slow on 32-bit machines.
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