On Nov 22, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Craig White wrote:

On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 11:19 -0700, Chris Gehlker wrote:

[snip]

So out of curiosity I went to the web to find out a little about  64-

bit OSes and this seems to be the conventional wisdom:

There are no advantages to 64-bit OSes that offset the losses from

bigger code due to bigger pointers and integers

There are classes of  applications that can really benefit from 64-

bithood, especially those that memory map big files.

32-bit OSes can be written to support 64-bit applications at least on

Intel and PowerPC.

So why is Linux moving in the direction of separate 32-bit and 64-bit

builds? Is it  just to remain portable on less popular hardware?

----

I've been using Fedora 7 86_64 at work on a fair amount of desktops  

and

it works well, including Firefox, including nspluginwrapper for 32 bit

Flash and Acrobat plugins and people are happy.

I'm curious. Why did you decide to go with a 64-bit version of Fedora?  

Do you have applications that work better or are only  available in 64- 

bit versions?

There must be something wrong in your setup or hardware because it

should work well...including launch times.

I strongly suspected that. I'm surprised though because I didn't have  

to do any tweaking to get the 32-bit version to work well. I'm still  

curious as to why the developers didn't go in the direction of just  

supporting 64-bit apps on a 32-bit kernel.