On Fri, 2008-10-03 at 09:22 +0100, Mark Rogers wrote:
Assuming hardware supports it (most new hardware will, surely) is there any good reason *not* to install a 64-bit O/S now?
Not really, you suffer from missing 64bit versions of closed software *cough* skype. but usually it is trivial to fix it so that the 32bit version works. However if you were limited on ram and have no intention of upgrading then I would say stick to 32bit as the memory footprint of a 32bit system should be smaller.
I've been running 64-bit Ubuntu since 7.04 (maybe before that, I can't remember) and never had any significant problems. It's only where you need to use Windows code (eg ndiswrapper, flash*) that it tends to be problematic but there's workarounds for stuff like that. Generally, though, Linux has been 64-bit capable for so long that O/S problems have been ironed out long ago.
I find ndispluginwrapper also has a neat side effect in that Flash doesn't seem to be able to take firefox with it when it goes bang. Generally if something goes pop with flash then I just get no flash until I restart firefox.