[wellylug] 32bit or 64bit

[Daniel Pittman]

Harrold Potter <dakmani1 at yahoo.co.nz> writes:

> 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?

Probably not.  You are unlikely to notice any real performance
difference between the 32 and 64 bit versions unless you have long
running processor intensive jobs[1] like scientific calculation or
graphical rendering.  Well, or if you have more than 3.5 GB of memory in
the machine. :)

The 32 bit version, at the moment, has much greater compatibility with
closed source tools including Flash and multi-media codecs, so I would
advise sticking with it on that basis.


Alternately, a 64-bit RPM based distribution may be less painful if you
really want the 64-bit part, but want the 32-bit binary stuff.  RPM
currently has better "multi-arch" support, which allows it to have 32
and 64 bit versions of software side by side more easily.

Personally, I don't think the trade-off is worth it, so have KUbuntu
32-bit on the hardware I use. :)

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...and probably not even then in most cases.

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