Re: Broken applications: Could we be honest?
Art Edwards wrote:
This brought up the question, who uses 64 bit Linux anyway?
Umm, let's see. I have servers, and servers, and servers. Did I mention
something about servers?
Besides the instruction set, which
can probably give some speed, but wouldn't justify the cost, the address
space in 64-bit OS's mean that we can solve much larger problems. Unles you're
not doing some heavy-duty, memory-intensive computation, 64-bits seems
to be simply a status symbol.
Or simply need the RAM. Like database servers. Or Java application/web servers.
Or, on the desktop, need to be able to give 4 GiB of RAM to 32-bit applications,
something you cannot do on x86 without special kernel patches. As an aside,
Windows XP 64-bit edition is really popular with Photoshop CS2 users for that
very reason.
Unless such core pieces as the debugging tool (ddd) and the data display tool
(xmgrace) are working, it is dishonest to pretend that the 64-bit version
is ready for testing.
ddd isn't the "core" debugger and gdb works fine for everything I've done.
It would be very nice if you, and other distro's, were
to put appropriate caveats on the websites, saying that 64-bit is really not
ready for the prime-time desktop.
That's been made clear on every forum I've visited and pretty much everywhere.
I think this is a clear case of someone not doing the requisite research before
making a purchasing decision I mean, you clearly were aware of some of the
caveats from your own e-mail, and it's not like you can't get a list of AMD64
debian packages online.
Thanks,
Adam
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