On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:59 +0100, Chris G wrote:
Can anyone envisage any bit 'gotchas' if I do this? Are there any major pitfalls when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit?
Having run 64bit for the last 3 years I would say "some" but the situation is getting better.
Primarily now you will have the following problems
No 64bit flash but you can't use the 32bit flash plugin with a 64bit browser without trickery. Solution manually install a 32bit browser or ignore flash content until they fix it.
Some closed source 32 bit only applications (skype, games etc) can have issues and may need twiddling or running through linux32 with the 32 bit versions of various libs installed.
Increased memory footprint for little gain on many things
In some cases you end up with a different bug list to those running 32bit distros, I had this for ages with OpenOffice where spadmin (OpenOffice printing) was completely broken on 64bit. Also I have from time to time had 64bit specific kernel issues that due to the smaller number of users/testers have taken longer to be detected, confirmed and fixed but thankfully this seems to have reduced somewhat in recent times.
Generally now it doesn't give me too much bother, and given that a good percentage of modern processors are 64bit capable and we are edging towards the memory addressing limitations of 32bit computing it is only a matter of time before 64bit becomes the norm for performance desktop computing so most of these problems will be resolved through necessity