x86_64 as Fedora's primary platform

[Andrew Haley]

On 09/28/2010 01:58 PM, mike cloaked wrote:
> 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.

Sure, but that's such a weird case that it's hardly relevant to the
person who just wants a default Fedora.  People who really need
bleeding-edge Thunderbird presumably know who they are.

> There must be quite a few other examples where people will want to run
> specific codes that are not built for 64 bit?

Of course, but that's hardly relevant here.

This message was sent to you from thunderbird-3.1.5pre, downloaded from
from that URL, running on my 64-bit Fedora system.

Andrew.