How long will 64bit Ubuntu users have to wait?

[Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy]

Kilz _ wrote:
> So I can expect Ubuntu 64bit to look good but not work to good?

I have been following this discussion and one thing that strikes me as odd, is that you never actually gave any good reason
as to why do you insist on running your Ubuntu in 64-bit mode. True, there are some benefits to 64-bit, but most of them are
not anywhere near the realm of common desktop usage. One of the main reasons for me, to install x86_64 version of RHEL on my
servers was to enable MySQL to use more then 3GB of ram. Mind you, that even in 32-bit mode the system can use more then 3GB of
RAM, using PAE, the problem only comes up when you have a single process trying to use more then 3GB of addressable memory.
The second plausible benefit comes from the larger bus. Obviously, once you can transfer data between memory, processor cache
and registers at twice the quantity per transfer operation you will process things faster. Unfortunately, for this benefit to
work your software (or at least computationally intensive parts of it) would have to be designed from the start to use 64-bit data
transfers. I am not sure just how much software out there is properly 64-bit aware. In any case this leads me back to the initial
question. What are the benefits of running native 64-bit desktop for a modern user? I can see the following scenarios:

1. You are a scientist or engineer writing your own heavily computational programs for your research/work.
2. You are using a properly 64-bit aware software that does heavy computations all the time e. g.
	a) 3D modeling/rendering
	b) Video/Audio processing/converting
	c) Other similar stuff
3. You are hosting slashdot.org or similar site on your desktop (i.e. your desktop is also a high load server)
4. Because you feel cool knowing that your system is running 64-bit when everyone else's is 32-bit.

Except for the last one I don't see any of the above as a common desktop usage pattern. And yes, you are right, most systems coming out
today are 64-bit and Vista will have a 64-bit version right from the start and probably, eventually new versions of programs will start
to come out in 64-bit first. Well, they are not now. Hardly anything AFAIK is 64-bit and you know yourself that it causes problems in 64-bit
world (remember those flash sites you couldn't see?). So why run 64-bit?