64-Bit Support

Arch Linux announced that a previous announcement that they were discontinuing support for the 32-bit/i686 architecture in their distribution was, in fact, a an April Fool’s joke.

On a positive note, some users discovered that they were, in fact, running 64-bit processors, and many of them switched to the Arch Linux 64-bit version. As they put it in their original post, “the overall opinion of the developers is that the x86_64 port is now complete enough to justify this decision and that this is in keeping with Arch’s philosophy of supporting current generation hardware. The x86_64 architecture has been available since 2002 (compared to i686 which is from 1995), and we believe most of our i686 users have x86_64 compatible hardware.”

If you are running a 64-bit processor, why shouldn’t you run the 64-bit version of your operatng system? While 64-bit Windows is still, for some reason, immature and undersupported, it is very mature on Linux, although some software has not be retooled to compile under it…Boxee comes to mind.

Fedora 11, the next version of Fedora we’re so enthused about, they are revisiting their architecture support. The 32-bit version of Fedora will now be built for i586 by default, instead of i386, indicating a removal of official Fedora support for older 32-bit processors. Realistically, anyone who is still running an older processor…you should upgrade. The update should produce speed increases.

The biggest advantage of 64-bit operating system is that it allows addressing of more than 3.5GB of RAM. With RAM becoming more and more affordable(Our first megabyte cost $80, now that’ll get you several gigabytes), the speed boost is a useful one. Further support under 32-bit Fedora for PAE-supporting 32-bit hardware(Pentium II/III/4, or Atom) will allow some support for more RAM under these processors.

And finally, 64-bit OSes can run 32-bit software. Backward compatibility is assured.

So, why not? Someone tell us.