x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 09/27/2010 10:03 PM, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>
>> If anything I would expect the 32bit Desktop Live torrent download
>> activity to be lower because of the promotion of the direct download
>> link of that particular iso.  The splits in 32bit and 64bit download
>> activity in the torrent server is very suggestive of a continued
>> preference for 32bit installs regardless of what we promote.
>
> Sure, but the question is how much of that is simply due to a lack of
> awareness.  To a first order approximation, if you have 64-bit
> hardware, then a 64-bit spin is better.  We know that, but how many of
> our users do?  The strong suggestion we make is that 32-bit is the
> default, and in the absence of any other information I'll always go
> for the default.  As will most people...

May I chip in another thought here?  Although in principle it is
better if 64 bit versions are used on capable hardware there still
remains a series of issues with some code - eg firefox and thunderbird
are not always built for 64 bit and there are issues with
corresponding extensions and multilib library issues as a consquence.
If the default were made 64 bit then these kinds of issues would come
to the fore in quite large numbers.

I believe that keeping i686 as the default and letting users decide to
opt in to 64 bit is the right way forward until the number of 64 bit
specific problems reduces to acceptable levels.

-- 
mike c