On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 09:36:59PM +0300, Muli Ben-Yehuda wrote: > On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 07:32:29PM +0300, Eli Billauer wrote: > > > It's not like I expect Firefox to address 1 GB of RAM. > > There's no 1GB of RAM limitation with 32 bit. Perhaps you meant 4GB of > RAM? > > > So it really makes me wonder: Why are the preinstalled binaries on a > > 64 bit machine, well, 64 bit executables? I run a 64 bit machine > > because I want the *overall* RAM to exceed 4 GB, but except for > > virtual machines, I don't expect any application to have problems > > with the 32 bit limitation. > > I speculate that the best reason, from the distribution's point of > view, is that it is simpler to only maintain and support one > environment (64 bit) rather than maintain and support co-existing 32 > bit and 64 bit environments. Distributions will grudgingly carry both > 32 bit and 64 bit versions of an application where there 64 bit > version is deficient in some sense (e.g., firefox with flash) but > would naturally like to minimize these hassles.
>From a distribution's point a view, on 64bit x86 it is actually safe to assume that you have some useful optimization and a resonably recent CPU. That said, Debian and Ubuntu are now switching to MultiArch support as well. It is said to be better designed than the current bi-arch support in RPM-based releases. But it only just now got to the stage of being useful enough to actually confuse users. So we'll just have to wait and see. -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best tzaf...@debian.org | | friend _______________________________________________ Haifux mailing list Haifux@haifux.org http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux