[ltp] Should I use 64-bit or 32-bit for my new Thinkpads?

[Micha]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 15:10:47 -0800
Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 04:35:49PM -0500, David A. Desrosiers wrote:
> > Should I install a 64-bit Linux on the T61p, or stick with a 32-bit 
> > Linux? I'm not sure a 64-bit version of Linux would really give me any 
> > benefits, and it would certainly limit what software I can run by a 
> > fairly significant amount (the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox being 
> > one good example).
> 

Actually if you install the 32bit libraries most things work. The only thing I
ran into up to now that doesn't work, at least with the support of the 32bit
libraries is the browser java plugin

> Conventional wisdom is that architecturally x86-64 is far superior to
> x86-32, between the extra registers and the extra vm room.  I don't
> have numbers offhand, but the theory says there should be a moderate
> speed boost from using x86-64.  (The increased VM room is also

Practice shows negligible if any boost usually, sometimes even a speed
decrease, and all this at the cost of higher memory usage.

> critical if you run large apps -- I have simulations that regularly
> use >2G of memory, and on 32bit that just doesn't... work so well.)
> 

If you have a lot of memory (over 2 or 3 GIGs) or you do memory intensive
mathematical calculations, you are probably better off running 32bit for the
moment.

> If you're programming on the box, a minor consideration may be how
> similar your development and deployment hardware are -- working on
> x86-64 I've accidentally written code that wasn't 32-bit clean, which
> was a nice reversal from the usual... these issues are easy to fix,
> though.
> 
> How much 64-bit will limit your software choices depends heavily on
> what software you actually use.  I suspect you are overestimating the
> difficulties here.  All FOSS software is 64-bit clean these days;
> 64-bit Ubuntu is indistinguishable from 32-bit Ubuntu.  Really the
> only case where 64-bit is a problem is when you:
>   -- Have an app you want to run 64-bit
>   -- ...that takes plugins
>   -- ...and you want to use proprietary 32-bit plugins
>   -- ...and no-one's gone to heroic efforts to make those plugins work
>      anyway.
> The only time this comes up commonly are Flash, and proprietary video
> codecs ("w32codecs"), and Flash is solved by "nspluginwrapper", which
> Ubuntu distributes.  (This is the "heroic efforts" mentioned above --
> basically, if you install flash through apt, it should just work, even
> on 64-bit.)  So that leaves just w32codecs, and I just don't often
> need to watch movies in weird old formats that the ffmpeg people
> haven't already reverse-engineered...
> 
> HTH,
> -- Nathaniel
>