32 or 64??

[John DeCarlo]

On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Have you tried using Wine on 64 bit? Some apps work, some don't.
>

First I heard of that.  But I don't do too much fancy with Wine.  Mostly
games and such.  Everything *I* have tried works the same as under 32-bit.

I suppose you have a reference you could point us to?  That way we could
look at that and see if something important to us is impacted.


> Flash? I don't know about *buntu 9.10 (I personally use 32 bit) but in
> 9.04 installing Flash on 64 bit was a headache.


I don't remember any headache with 9.04.  You *did* have to wait for the
64-bit Linux to get released, or else use the Alpha.

With 9.10, Flash 64-bit is the standard, nothing special to do.


> Does Virtualbox still
> have problems with 64 bit?
>

I think you have to be running 64-bit host for 64-bit guests.


> Now tell me, what advantage does 64 bit have?


Basically, you don't have to jump through any hoops to use all your RAM.

Otherwise, as others have posted, some things run much faster as 64-bit and
some don't.

Plus, you are still restricted to running lots of 32-bit apps.


> Sure, a user _might_not_
> have any problems with 64 bit, but then again he might. Why take that
> risk when 32 bit works fine?
>

You might not have any problems if you go to sites that use Flash, but you
might.  Why take the risk?


> The final straw for me is that many tutorials and guides directed at
> *buntu users assume 32 bit. The user saves himself quite a headache by
> stickin with 32 bit, even with 4 GB RAM.
>

I can't imagine anything along these lines being different, until you get
into programming.  And the hoops you would have to jump through to try
64-bit programming on a 32-bit system seem crazy to even contemplate.

As far as I can tell, last year I needed to install extra packages (like
64-bit Flash) on my own.

Now, I don't need to do anything special.

My only complaint is that there aren't as many 64-bit applications around,
like Firefox.

-- 
John DeCarlo, My Views Are My Own
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