Change RPi to 32 bit architecture

Question

While attempting to install Wine on my RPi, I changed the architecture to 32 bit. I used the command, sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386, but I don't know how to change back to 64 bit. Does anyone know the command?

Answer 1

The following will remove the architecture you just added:

sudo dpkg --remove-architecture i386

However, there's something important to note here. The i386 architecture generally refers to 32-bit processors based on the IA-32 architecture. i386 is compatible with the vast majority of desktops and laptops, but not your Pi. The Pi uses an ARM processor which is not compatible with i386.

Any program compiled for i386 simply cannot be 'understood' by ARM processors and so cannot run. Running Wine won't work on a Pi because Windows is an x86 operating system with x86 programs, and they can't be run on a Pi.

While the Pi 3 does have a 64-bit processor, the operating systems such as Raspbian are still 32-bit so you can't really "change back to 64-bit"... since you were never there! The architecture for 64-bit ARM processors is, rather unimaginatively, arm64, but the default for Raspbian is the 32-bit armhf (at least according to dpkg --print-architecture).