On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 02:40:14PM +0200, Ioan Ionita wrote: > > I hope this isn't teaching you to suck eggs, but my experience with > > various 64bit versions of Linux is - frankly - don't bother currently. > > > > There are too many issues and non-supported applications for native > > 64bit platforms. So you end up needing to build a multi-lib system (both > > 64 and 32bit libraries) which, to me anyway, feels like bloat that I can > > do without. > > FUD. No examples. What issues? What applications? of those, how many > are closed-source? In my experience, Flash works flawlessly with > nspluginwrapper, so no need for 32-bit firefox. Anything else > problematic? Skype? > I seem to recall looking at nspluginwrapper a while ago, but it needed 32-bit libs (which is fine for binary distros like ubuntu, but not very good for compile-from-source non-multilib). I don't use skype, but flash mostly works on my pure64 CLFS build (totem and gnash are the main components, everything compiled from source) - I'm watching youtube while I write this. I'm also able to watch windows (.wmv) downloads on this.
There might be problems with some AV apps or libraries, and perhaps java and OOo - all the AV I use seems to work ok on x86_64-64 (unlike on ppc, ppc64), and I avoid java and OOo (I tried a binary when it was staroffice and still haven't got over the bloat!). Of course, for people who *want* to use closed-source binaries, multilib is probably better, and for binaries32-bit is best. For we who compile from source, getting a working multilib desktop is *very* educational (as in "a lot of pain, might not work well the first couple of times, and needs care across gnome upgrades"). > > > Also, I have yet to see any decent data that provides compelling reasons > > such as performance improvement etc to make we want to go to 64bit. I'm, > > sure the time will come, and maybe you have specific apps that would > > really benefit from bigger address space etc, but I'm a "regular" kind > > of Desktop user and there is more headache than benefit in it for me. > > I'm a regular kind of Desktop user myself and I'd never move back to > 32-bit. I've been on x86_64 for almost 2 years now and it's been > wonderful. My benchmarks have shown a 20% performance gain on some > workloads. > Thanks for confirming that - I made up some benchmarks a long time ago (scripts to oggenc some wav files and manipulate some photos with ImageMagick) and saw improvements of around 20%. Of course, that doesn't mean system builds are 20% faster, and you do need to have a working 64-bit system before you can test to see if it's worthwhile :) ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
