On Sunday, February 02, 2014 01:58:54 PM Rick Macdonald wrote: > I've been running 32bit Debian since release 0.93, before buzz was > released. I've been through a few PCs over these 20 years, and now my > latest one is dying on me (HP Dual core Pentium D, 4GB RAM). >
Sorry to see your dual core is dying. I like running quad cores today, makes compiling stuff from source speedier. > I'd like to take a step up and get a machine with more memory (12 or > 16GB). I've done some searching and it seems these days there are no > limitations with having access to all Debian packages, especially if one > uses the multi-arch feature. > Frankly there's still barely any justification to go above the 4 GiB limit. If you want lots of memory I'd still suggest saviing money and bumping up to 8 GiB, but the reality is that even if you're gaming on Windows 4 GiB is still plenty. > Still, I'd like to ask on the list here. Are there any issues with > switching to amd64? What about drivers? > No real major issues, no. I've never had problems with drivers (Even binary blobs.) in 64-bit, and most Linux distributions have very good multilib capability. Though personally I think Debian's multilib support is not as good as Archlinux's (Arch simply provides a multilib repository, Debian does something weird with forcing architectures in apt and dpkg. Frankly if you have a 64-bit machine it's a waste of your machine's potential staying on a 32-bit operating system even with less than 4 GiB of RAM. You will, especially on this mailing list, get a lot of people who act like running 64-bit if you don't have more than 4 GiB of RAM is some sort of apocalyptic disaster, but I've been running on sub-4 GiB 64-bit rigs with 64- bit Linux since 2007 with absolutely zero issues. even when running 32-bit software on 64-bit Linux. > The new machine will likely be an off-the-shelf HP I7-4470 CPU machine > with an NVIDIA GeForce card, somewhere between a GT635 and a GTX660. > If you're interested in mac performace (At a little higher cost.) I'd definitely recommend a dedicated card and never use integrated graphics. Looks like you have some in mind. I use a GT 640 in mine. > What about running 32 bit windows and apps in wine or VMWare? > No issues I've ever seen running 32-bit stuff in WINE or VMs on a 64-bit processor, again, because of multilib support, chances are when you install WINE it'll be a 32-bit version. There are 64-bit versions of WINE but most people use 32-bit because most Windows software is still 32-bit. > Regards, > Rick Conrad -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1394993.rn4JIBNPGP@twilight
