If you’re the owner of an i586 machine, and perhaps an Arch Linux fan, I think it’s time to shed a tear for our dearly departed Lowarch.

It’s really a shame — cut down in the prime of its life, with so much potential for revitalizing old, pre-Pentium III hardware. How else can you get a K6-2 to the desktop in 40 seconds? Forty seconds?! I know 3Ghz Pentium 4 machines lumbering along under Gnome Ubuntu that need a full minute to get their lard butts to a desktop.

Fast, clean, simple, efficient, trustworthy … these are all words that apply to our dear friend, which has now passed into stagnation, slowed down to a standstill, its wheels of progress finally coasting to a halt.

All the same, you can’t blame anyone for Lowarch fading away. Not many of us are paid to work with Linux, and I’m guessing the saint who ran Lowarch wasn’t being paid for it either. So many of us benefited from the generosity and hard work of the Lowarch founder, it would be a shame if no one ever said anything else about it but, “Goodbye.”

So take one last look, maybe install it on your old Pentium machine or run it in a virtualization window. See how much you can still get done with the dusty skeleton of a mighty fine distro. Then shed a tear, wipe the drive and maybe make a toast to the memory of our dear friend, a fine piece of work … Lowarch.