[ALUG] 32 versus 64 bit

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 08:35 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> 
> Definitely not.  In fact, the solution to my own problems might be to
> do a 
> clean install of a 32 bit environment.  Its just not worth the
> aggravation.  
> Maybe if you need to be able to address more memory.  Or if you don't
> install 
> all kinds of odd things that are 32 bit only - something which has
> given me 
> untold grief.  There don't seem to be any gains, and there is lots of 
> aggravation.

That's a shame, Here I have been 64bit on my main machine for almost 4
years now. Initially I had some problems with 32bit only software and
having to run a 32bit instance of Firefox for flash etc.

This was also back in the days of OpenOffice 1.x which couldn't print
directly in 64bit mode because spadmin was broken.

Then I had a couple of 64bit specific bugs that bit me and then I
started messing about with compiz which at the time needed svn checkouts
etc to work in 64bit mode.

But for the last couple of years I would say the 64bit experience on
ubuntu has been no problem whatsoever. I hardly notice to be honest as
with ubuntu things like the pluginwrapper for flash are done
automagically. 

I do have a few 32bit only things installed such as Skype, Zattoo and a
few 32bit games. Most things just work if you have the ia32libs package
installed..other things need tricks like linux32 (which itself is a
wrapper for setarch to fool stuff) but generally any software that
braindead I try to avoid. If you are in a real fix on Debian/Ubuntu
there is getlibs but I haven't worked out if that is made of evil or
not.

As to the benefits, apart from the support for more memory I have seen
notable performance improvements in only a few things..I do encode media
quite a bit and I have seen perhaps 20-30% here.

The very sad thing here is the lack of commercial support for 64bit
systems...this is also true in the Windows Camp. With new machines
pretty much being 64bit capable by default and coming with 2GB as
standard it is time the software industry woke up and realised that
pretty soon the 64bit arch will have to be the dominant platform.