I'm about to do a linux install on a E2160 Core 2 duo. I'll be using both ubuntu and opensuse 10.3

My question is which archetecture should I use - x86/i386 or a 64 bit version.

I seem to remember a couple of years ago everyone said to stay away from 64 bit on athlon 64s and use the x86 version, mainly due to drivers and addons being much easier.

Is this still the case, in terms of repositories etc. What archetecture would the majority of people run a desktop on with a core 2. Note that ease of use/compatibility is higher on my priority list than raw performance.

Thanks

that is a very smart question. There are now a lot of distros that offer 64 bit.

http://distrowatch.com/search.php?ca...&status=Active

2) Ease of use....imho that means distro must support KDE...not meant to be inflaming but I know there will be some who object.

3) Ease of software package management...major ones all good.

4) speed to update any security issues....was raised by Linuxformat magazine and some were slowwwwww. However, because they all tend to use modified stuff....you may have some safety. I break away from my distro and use a vanilla kernel so I can always have the latest ....when I have time to patch etc.

5) Continuing that theme....web browser is often attacked so I prefer a non-distro version of a browser.

6) your motherboard chipset and other hardware can still be an issue? who knows unless you research the HCL on the right hand side of this page.

7) laptops can be an issue due to tendency to have all onboard with propierty drivers (microsoft based)

imho...it is still safer to run 32 bit and install virtualbox emulator to test the range of software available for 64bit in your intended distro.

I really don't think most home-users will notice much difference between a 64 OS and a 32 OS. I've ran Ubuntu 64 for a while and loved it. The issues I had were minor. Most often than not, it was because of lack of support for the 64 bits architecture from closed sourced applications. For example: Opera was not available at the time, nor Skype. Wine, for some reason, did not work for me with any application/game which I used to run in Ubuntu x86. Flash, while working, was buggy as hell and I never managed to run Flash in fullscreen with Ubuntu x86_64.

Because of those minor issues, I went back to Ubuntu x86. My suggestion is this: Try both. Ubuntu 64 is not harder to use at all, but you may face some issues that you most likely wouldn't using x86. Again, with the nearly non-existent advantages for a home user to use a 64 OS and the minor issues you will face, it is perhaps better to stick with a 32bits OS, unless you are going to run a dedicated server or something...

My 2 cents

Regards!

We had a benchmark post here on LQ about a year ago. I benchmarked my system (Core2Duo 6600, 2GB DDR2-800) and Ubuntu 32 bit came out marginally faster than Debian 64 bit. Benchmarks do not necessarily reflect real-world performance but the results did pretty much confirm what I had felt all along: as long as you don't do number crunching or run a very large and active database, there isn't any difference between the two at all, in fact, it is often 64 bit that is the slower one. Many who have claimed enormous performance gains upgraded from 32 bit on a Pentium or an AMD to 64 bit on a dual core and assumed that the better performance was OS architecture related. But the truth is that a C2D will run a 32 bit OS just as fast. It's simply the better hardware that makes the difference in most situations.
Then again, it's really not much of an issue anymore. The closed-source packages that were 32 bit only back then are still 32 bit only - but most 64 bit distros now ship some additional packages that make it possible to run them without any headaches.

i use 32bit on a amd X2 (64 bit)
bacause i cant get flash or skype to work with 64 bit

Thanks All.
I'll be sticking with x86 then as I dont need any additional hassles or incompatibiities. If the even if there had been performance gains to go with the hassle I'd still have stayed away, so with negligible gains for a desktop environment I'll definitely take the easy route.

As a seperate question/thought, gven that athlon 64 and intel 64 has been around a while, and vista is 64 bit, why the reluctance for everyone to embrace 64 bit? I'd have thought that would now be the standard and 32 bit would be considered legacy and be the one that had compatibility problems?

Well, I'm sure that Microsoft are going to kill 32 bit eventually. I'm seeing more and more people buy 4GB of RAM or more just because (they have heard that) Vista is such a hardware glutton - and 32 bit won't allow them to use that much. There is a trick called PAE to access 4GB and up but MS did all they could with the release of XP SP2 to discourage people from even considering that option.

In the meantime, it's corporate greed that sets the tune - the OSS community has a 64 bit version of (nearly) every package one can think of. The thing is that porting existing software to 64 bit frequently means revising large chunks of code. It takes time, it costs money, so as long as it's not inevitable, why bother?

Been running Sidux and Fedora 64-bit and I have to say that they are at least 95% of the way there. Sometimes one needs to do a little dancing to get things working, but so far I have found a solution to every little problem. Yes none of the problems have been of the kind that used to make me think bugger this I am going back to the 32 bit version.

For me it's all good. But I have to agree that performance wise I can not see any discernible differences.

Thanks All.