x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[mike cloaked]

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 1:29 PM, Andrew Haley <aph at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 09/28/2010 12:06 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
>> 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
>
> Huh?  Sure they are.

Some people use nightlies for example -
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-comm-1.9.2/
Here there are no 64 bit versions that I am aware of?

I do this when the stock version is somewhat behind even the stable
release from mozilla.  eg in f12 the current thunderbird is 3.1.4 but
the current f12 version is 3.0.7, and similar for firefox. Yet this is
still a supported release - yes f13 is up to current stable releases
from mozilla for both of these. However in the mozilla filestore for
latest stable for thunderbird at:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/3.1.4/linux-i686/en-GB/

there is no 64 bit version, so if running 64 bit f12 then it would be
necessary to install the 32 bit thunderbird and make sure that
necessary 32 bit libraries were also installed to make it run?

However in the future, say when f15 is still supported but f16 is
current, it may well be that it is more work to run applications such
as this that are more up to date than the Fedora packages either by
messing with multilib library install or building the application for
64 bit from source.

There must be quite a few other examples where people will want to run
specific codes that are not built for 64 bit?   To take the hassle out
of dealing with issues like this I install 32 bit and life is a bit
easier!

However no doubt the best decision will emerge from the discussion?

-- 
mike c