With the proliferation of 64bit consumer processors these days, you’d think the operating systems would be keeping up. But having recently been handed an AMD Turion64-based laptop, I’m finding it less than satisfactory. For servers, just about every package in the major repositories have been ported to 64bit linux in the Redhat (CentOS) and Fedora distributions. But if you’ve got a 64-bit processor on your consumer-grade desktop or personal laptop, and plan to do anything fun or creative on it, you might want to just hang back and stick with the 32-bit i386 distribution.
Here’s a partial list of things I can’t have in my 64bit linux distros. Fortunately, I installed a 32-bit Fedora side-by-side so that I can still have this stuff.
Adobe Flash — no Youtube, Break or many other sites. Adobe has no plans to port their apps to 64bit linux, although there is a petition out there for it. I am signer number 13,800 as of yesterday.
Doom and Quake.
Plastic Animation Paper (animation software)
So the rule of thumb: Server, no GUI, standard apps: 64bit. Desktop, GUI, fun/creative apps: 32bit.
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