Re: amd64 into mainstream
On 4/18/05, Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> Alioth doesn't perform as well as us.debian.org for me for some reason,
Neither does the core archives server, but that is what mirrors are for :-)
> And don't forget about the rest of the Debian infrastructure, like having
> non-us support us too,
Which includes some 8 obscure packages. I think it is time to do away
with it, anyway. Or create debian-non-EU, debian-non-india and
debian-non-china for fairness :-)
> or being able to grab AMD64 packages off of
> www.debian.org's web interface,
Yes, that is indeed inconvenient, but you can always look up the name
and do an apt-get.
> along with third parties that don't support
> us now because we're still an unclaimed orphan.
How may of these third parties support PPC, mipsel or S390 because
they are supported ports? No, I think support is missing because third
parties can always tell people to go with mainstream, which means
32bit userland (and kernel). Redhat and SuSE have already created
facts: they are (trying to be) fully compatible to 32bit userland.
> There are a *lot* of Athlon64s out there already, compatible with and
> competitively priced against existing 32bit X86 chips,
Sure, but that does not translate into an incentive to install
debian/amd64. On AMD, you will see a nice performance gain, but on
Intel you don't even get that. At the same time, you introduce a lot
of problems that you did not have with debian/i386.
And of course there is the other side: if you have a recent system,
changes are *very* high that debian does not support it. I bought a
pretty basic Athon64 system, and Debian does not recognise the hard
disk, does not work with the graphics card, and it doesn't support the
NIC and the "winmodem". Consequently, the installation was an absolute
nightmare, nothing the average user could possibly do. (And most of
these problems are not 64bit related...)
So I think the problem is a lot deeper than not getting amd64 into
Sid. The whole testing process seems to be mostly stalled due to
changing problems with one of the more obscure platforms... no, I
don't want to restart that debate, but I want to mention the bigger
picture.
> But alas, despite the writing on the wall, we still have to
> wait for Debian to get its act together, all the while losing more people to
> (K)Ubuntu - I have to admit to having been seriously tempted to switch myself
> lately - if our AMD64 support is "complete", then Ubuntu's AMD64 platform is
> "polished".
I full agree here: Ubuntu is more attractive to the average end user.
But I do not understand why everybody is so upset about this. After
all, there is no "one size fits all" distribution. Debian can still be
the best distribution for servers, for weird hardware and for
development, but for the average desktop user it never was an
outstanding choice.
What I would really like to see is binary compatibility between Debian
and Ubuntu. So far, that seems to be mostly the case, but it is more a
coincidence of freeze dates than a feature.
Thomas
Reply to: