[smolloy]

Originally Posted by bigtomrodney

With all that said I found absolutely no difference in performance between 64-bit and 32-bit, so for the sake of the extra problems and workarounds there was no incentive to run it.

Except for those few of us that need the 64 bit memory access for our jobs.

[i92guboj]

Originally Posted by bigtomrodney

From my own use of 64-bit distros I can say it all works great with the following caveats :-

• There is no 64-bit flash plugin, so that can be messy
• Some codecs in the past have been problematic, though I believe this is fixed now
• Java

It's not that 64-bit distros themselves are problematic, it's the additional proprietary add-ons that mess things up. With all that said I found absolutely no difference in performance between 64-bit and 32-bit, so for the sake of the extra problems and workarounds there was no incentive to run it.

I don't know how other distros do. I only hear horror stories. I use amd64 in Gentoo since long ago, though, and I haven't had too much problems. Flash is crappy, but such is as well on 32 bits.

Gentoo takes care off all the multilib stuff, and it provides precompiled 32 bits packages for the needed libs, so, there's no problem using a 32 bit plugin under amd64.

There's no problem either to install grub or wine, which can be compiled on 32 bits under amd64 without a problem. Of course, your mileage may vary. But I haven't had any amd64 specific problem. It just works, just like the 32 bits version.

I remember hearing or reading somewhere that Gentoo linux was the first distro to offer official support for amd64, so, that might be one of the reasons why x86 and amd64 works equally well on Gentoo.

[bigtomrodney]

Originally Posted by smolloy

Except for those few of us that need the 64 bit memory access for our jobs.

Yeah of course that is an incentive, if you are running more 4GB or more of RAM. My point was that the performance doesn't really change as most application haven't been programmed to take advantage of 64-bit processors. At the moment what we are mostly seeing are just programs recompiled to be a native 64-bit binary.

Take it from me. I have a Core2Quad processor and I would love to be running 64-bit in principle. But having run it in the past there just isn't any performance incentive to switch, as I only have 3GB of RAM.