I know a specific reason Debian is losing users... AMD64. AMD expects to ship over 5 million amd64 chips this year, aiui. It currently costs less than $600 USD to build a complete AMD64 system. Also, every other major distribution (Fedora, Gentoo, Mandrake, RHEL, SUSE) already supports it but Debian does not. Debian has a preliminary multiarch and pure64 port but they are not being kept up to date, with both being several months out of date. Running native amd64 code is much faster than i386 code, certainly more than the avg 0.75% figure for i386 subarch optimization someone else quoted. I have personally seen 50% improvement in some applications. Hopefully the multiarch support in Debian can get off the ground soon before we lose too many more users. Chris
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