x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 15:12, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 13:48, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The Fedora web resources (e.g. http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora )
>>> continue to promote i686 installs over x86_64, the result being that
>>> only a third of fedora users are on x86_64.
>>>
>>> When will the Fedora project begin recommending x86_64 as the
>>> preferred option on the relevant hardware?
>>
>> Well while many people have x86_64 capable hardware, 66% of the
>> systems have less than 2GB of ram installed on them. The gain of extra
>> registers is taken over by the amount of extra memory used. So I am
>> not sure pushing 64 bit will gain much beyond "why am I using so much
>> memory now?" messages.
>
> I agree that systems which are very short on memory will be happier
> with i386 but I don't think 2GBytes is at all a reasonable cut-off.
> None of the x86_64 desktops I have access to are currently using more
> than 1Gbyte (ignoring cache, of course).  Only something like 11% of
> systems have less than 512MBytes, roughly 1/3rd with less than 1Gbyte.
>

My laptop went into swap after about 4 hours of work from firefox,
thunderbird, and xchat. At 4 GB I find it pretty stable.

On a longer state. Redesigning that page always causes a painful long
list of arguments as everyone wants to be on the top or listed. PPC,
KDE, LXDE, and s390 all come out of the woodwork and want a big link
on top (or lets randomize it to make it even!). So after the last
bikeshedding and my distro is bigger and larger than yours talk.. it
was decided to go with one that worked best on the largest install
base.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines