On 05/07/10 23:40, Jim McCloskey wrote:
I recently acquired a new Dell Studio 15 laptop and mean to install Debian (squeeze) on it. I'm trying to decide whether to do a 64-bit install (amd64) or a 32-bit install (i386). My understanding is that the amd64 port is now very complete, and that the principal difficulty would probably be with flashplayer (since Adobe withdrew the 64-bit version of flashplayer 10 for linux). There seem to be various workarounds for this issue, but I was wondering if the performance gain that one might expect from the 64-bit architecture over the 32-bit architecture would be worth the extra trouble entailed by these workarounds. The machine has a 1.6GHz Intel Quad Core processor and 6GB of RAM. The GPU is an ATI Mobility Radeon (HD 5470) with 1GB of onboard memory.
I have a (now) ageing Intel Core2 Duo machine as my Desktop which I originally installed the 64 bit version of Debian. I found these little work arounds annoying and just occasionally they didn't work.
I had the opportunity after a disk upgrade to do a complete re-install and I chose to switch back to the 32 bit version.
I haven't noticed any performance degradation and I just don't get any hassel from issues with flash etc.
I only (sic) have 2GB memory - but again to be honest, I run mysql, postgres and a web server in the background (as well as the standard daemons such sshd and inetd) and I rarely even get to swap. I get the impression (but I haven't done any careful analysis) that the 32 bit stuff uses slightly less memory resources.
My main (non surfing the net) activity is web development although I have done a bit of video editing
The only downside I have had is that I recently was trying to install a 64 bit version of Debian on a server I have and accidently installed the 32 bit version from the install SD card I had made and had forgotten to label as 32 bit.
-- Alan Chandler http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk