[wellylug] 32bit or 64bit

[Jonathan Harker]

Harrold Potter wrote:
> Ok what is my best option. I am playing with Ubuntu and Kubuntu at the
> moment, I like the look and ease of use of KDE best though and am still
> not technically minded like the majority of people on here but I must
> say I have come a long way since a year ago using Xandros.
> 
> At the moment I have only tried the 32 bit versions of both and not sure
> if it is worth trying the 64bit version as I have heard that multimedia
> is a bit of a nightmare, i.e getting dvd playback and also playing the
> likes of wmv files.
> 
> Is the 64bit version that much faster that it is worth trying?

I use 32 bit Ubuntu on my home server and WS (both AMD) as well as my
AMD64 laptop.

You are right - 64 bit Suse and Ubuntu both work well until you want to
run (usually proprietary) things like Flash, WMV, Quicktime, vmware etc,
as well as some less obvious things like odd binary-only drivers for
things like modems and wireless cards. These aren't impossible, but
shagging about with a 32 bit chroot falls squarely into the "technically
minded" category, methinks.

I found that the difference in speed between 32 and 64 bits, testing
Fedora Suse and Ubuntu, was just not noticeable enough in day-to-day use
for me to be bothered with it. The huge potential advantages of 64 bits
only become apparent in specialised apps - database servers, hardcore
numerical and statistical computation, climate simulation, modeling, etc).

I also found that Kubuntu is a bit crap as a KDE distro on the whole
(when compared with Suse). I found installing Ubuntu and apt-get install
my KDE apps afterwards worked much better. At work I'm using Gnome which
I never used to be a great fan of, but have grown to like it (although I
really do wish they'd fix those rubbish open/save dialogs!)

J