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How much trouble is a 64-bit OS right now?

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urlwolf:
How much trouble is a 64-bit OS right now?
In my experience (Ubuntu): a lot. You are on your own compiling stuff, in the best case. Or you just don't have some niceties, like flash.
On the other hand, I do need to address 8Gb of memory (or more) so I have to live with it.

I'm considering moving to win 64-bit if there things are more solid.

Anyone with day-to-day experiences? Which flavor of windows would work best on 64-bit?
Should I wait for Win 7 or even use the beta?
How difficult would it be to pimp out Vista 64 so it's not as annoying, and is it worth it at all?

Thanks
PS: I'd also would like to hear from the OSX crowd :)

f0dder:
I haven't had any major problems with XP64 for quite a while, and Vista64 does very nice on my laptop as well. There's been a few threads about the topic and some of the stuff still applies (shell extensions, drivers for oldstuff, a few apps/games here and there), but all in all it works flawlessly for me.

I'd say Vista64 (run through vLite) is just fine, if you can't wait for Win7. Wouldn't run the beta on a production system, even if it seems very stable - better safe than sorry.

40hz:
XP64 is very solid. Ditto for Win7 beta (but f0dder's beta caveat applies). Don't have enough experience using Vista so I can't comment on that.

IMHO: Using 64-bit Linux for anything other than a very specialized high-performance singleton server doesn't make much sense. And to really gain the benefit, you'd also need to code your application up in native 64-bit, along with whatever libraries it would call.

Still, I guess that's the price you pay when you're responsible for issuing the Launch Codes. ;D

But even then, I'd be more inclined to go with a 32-bit cluster or distributed solution if at all possible. So unless you have a very specific native 64-bit application you want to run, I'd stick to 32-bit for a Linux desktop.

The problem with 64-bit Linux is that it is not full 64-bit binary from front to back. Most of the applications, and virtually all of the libraries included in a "64-bit" distro are still 32-bit. So even though you have a native 64 kernal, most of the code that gets called isn't. And once you go that hybrid route, performance goes right out the window.

BTW: What are you running that needs so much RAM? (Are you responsible for issuing Launch Codes?  :tellme:)

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Sidenote: here's a good website for 64-bit info and news: www.start64.com

Check it out! :Thmbsup:

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<edit -removed an erroneous comment> :-[

urlwolf:
BTW: What are you running that needs so much RAM? (Are you responsible for issuing Launch Codes?  tellme)
--- End quote ---

Just R.
But in general, I handle large sparse matrices, and even in an sparse format, they take up a lot of memory.

So it looks that win 64 works better than Linux. That is all I wanted to know.
Still, I worry about the day-to-day. If I'm going to be a beta tester for every tool I use, I'll waste a lot of time.

robinsiebler:
Honestly, other than being able to use more than 4GB of RAM, I can't think of any good reason to switch to Vista 64.  There's the whole 32-bit vs 64-bit program issue which has made several programs less useful under Vista 64 than they would be under Vista 32.  And I have had significant problems installing/running admittedly older games on Vista 64.

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