[YLUG] Install Day - To 64 bit or not to 64 bit?

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

Morning all,

At last year's install day we had one or two of 64 bit machines turn up;
this year I think we can expect a lot more. Given that our install day
distro of choice, Ubuntu Dapper, is equally available in both 32 and 64
bit flavours this leaves us with a question - should we install 64 bit
Ubuntu on any 64 bit machines?

Points in favour:
- 'Nicer', somehow,
- Quicker, thanks to extra registers,
- Works sanely on large memory machines.

Point(s) against:
- No Flash/Realplayer/Java/W32codecs, at least not without unfeasable
  faffing about.

IMHO the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, except on machines that
actually need the expanded address space, so I think we should install
32 bit Ubuntu on 64 bit machines unless we're specifically asked for a
64 bit install, or the machine has more than 2GB of RAM. However, my
experience of 64 bit linux has all been on non-desktop systems with lots
of memory, so I could well be missing things.

Thoughts any/everyone?

Ewan


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