Sincerely, is Fedora ready for 64 bits?

[giacecco]

Hello everybody,
after reading several posts about 64 bit issues, I could not stop myself from thinking that perhaps the migration to the 64 bit platform is still an opportunity for linux professionals only.

I strongly believe that the effort the community is putting on setting up 64 bit documentation and software repositories (yum, apt...) is huge and incredibly precious as usual, anyway it seems to me that it is still early for a linux enthusiast-but-not-incredibly-skilled as I am to choose Fedora 64.

I seem to understand that compatibility issues, the setting up of the 32 bit compatibility for binary-distributed software (Sun's Java...), peripheral drivers and so on could become a huge obstacle for me. Anyway it would be a pity - after the budget I have spent on the new 64 bit hardware - use it with a 32 bit distro. You could say: the mistake has already taken place, and probably you are right.

Anyway, next wednesday I am going to set up the new pc. Please, let me know what you think about this matter. I guess the issue is more conceptual that pratical: is the 64 bit architecture the next or the far future? Is the effort to set a 64 bit distro working worth it? Is it worth it now? Will it be this winter (Core 3?).

I thank you all in advance,

Giacecco

[Bana]

It depends a lot on what you want to use the system for. If you plan on messing around with it and trying to watch DVD's or streaming video of any kind you probably want to stay with x86. The difference between x86 and x86_64 performance is significant (as given by anandtech.com s recent article) but the 3rd party repositories are still catching up and this makes general purpose tinkering quite difficult. For the moment, for someone of your experience (of how you described yourself) I wouldn't recommend having your production distro being x86_64. What I recommend is simply installing both and dual booting. Use the x86_64 as much as you can for as long as you can and then switch to x86 if you need to and you can alway go back to the x86_64 to use the new repos that pop up and or config features etc... Just put your /home partition on another drive to make the switching as easy as pie.

HTH

[Viro]

Well, I think the speed difference between x86-64 and plain old x86 isn't that great yet. Sure, you get a few speedups here and there if you're running a server (databases and webservers), but for normal desktop apps, you don't see much difference if any.

So my recommendation? Stick with x86 for now, or if you want to use x86-64, use Gentoo. It takes a long time to compile everything, but at least all the packages work and the number of packages available nearly equals that of x86.