[DC LoCo] 64 bit not recommended for daily deskttop usage -- why?

[Daniel Chen]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 11:13 PM, Xian R. <bowie101 at email.com> wrote:
> 32-bit - Recommended for most users
> 64-bit - Not recommended for daily desktop usage
>
>
> why? What/who do they recommend it for? Then why have it here?  32-bit for
> most users? Does that include users with 64 bit machines?

The fact that 64-bit is even offered as a radio selection is
interesting.  I concur that it may be less confusing to the casual
computer user to only offer the 32-bit automatically.  For instance,
we don't even support the native 64-bit refresh(es) of Adobe's Flash
plugin.  The version in the repositories is 32-bit for a variety of
hysterical raisins, perhaps the most significant of which is the
requirement of a slew of "compatibility" (32-bit) libs to install on a
64-bit host.  And that's all because there is no released support for
multiarch in Debian's (and by consequence Ubuntu's) dpkg.

I'll skip the boring details of nspluginwrapper, libasound2,
libasound2-plugins, libpulse0, ia32-libs, etc.  It isn't a pretty
problem, and there isn't a storage- and runtime-efficient manner to
handle it.  Yet.

Best,
-Dan