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

[Nathaniel Smith]

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).

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
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'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

-- 
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways.