I have to say that I have been quite impressed so far, with the relative ease of use of Kubuntu. When I first bought this laptop of mine about a year ago, I did contemplate on whether to convert to 64-bit or otherwise. The new laptop came with a Athlon X2 processor that is capable of executing 64-bit code. There were both pros and cons to doing it and from my initial survey at the time, there were more difficulties than advantages.
The reasons to shift to 64-bit are mainly to do with memory and speed.
With a 32-bit computer, the maximum amount of memory that can be addressed without segmentation is about 4 gigabytes. However, due to the way that most modern PCs are constructed, some of this memory is reserved for accessing devices attached to the processor instead. However, I only have 2 gigabytes of RAM installed in this notebook anyway, and I will not require much more than that in the near future. So, there is no reason for me to switch to 64-bits for memory purposes.
With the use of 64-bit data paths, larger numbers can be computed at once. This will come in particularly handy for people who use a lot of large integers or double precision floating point numbers, which are typically used in scientific computing. Since I am not a user of these sorts of applications, I will not significantly benefit from using 64-bit computing. So, you may ask why bother switching then.
Due to the vagaries of the IA32 architecture used in most modern PCs, there are only 8 internal 32-bit registers in a processor. These registers are used to perform all the computational functions of a processor. Data is usually held in these registers and manipulated, before being stored in main memory. The AMD64 extension both doubles the size and number of register to 16 internal 64-bit registers. Technically, this means that more data can be processed inside the processor at a time, increasing speed.
So, there is technical justification for switching, but it was mainly due to the fact that I just wanted to try it to see.
All I can say that the experience was extremely fruitful. I completely reformatted, installed and updated Kubuntu to the latest version with KDE4.1 in just about 3 hours. I can attest to the fact that there were no significant issues with the switch. All the problems and workarounds that were needed in the past, seems to have been fully handled by Kubuntu automatically. For example, when I installed Firefox, it automatically installed nspluginwrapper, which allows the 32-bit flash plugin to work in a 64-bit environment.
As for the perceived performance advantages, I have experienced some aspect of it. Decompressing an archive is much faster than before, as well as compiling code. I have not yet tried encoding a DVD but I suspect that it should be much faster as well. This is not to say that there were not other problems with the installation, it’s just that these problems were also there in the 32-bit installation and I could fix them easily.
So, all in all, I think that it is a no brainer. I will install 64-bit linux on every other 64-bit machine that I get in the future. There is little reason not to anymore. And most importantly, the Atom 230 that I plan to get for my HTPC, supports the EMT64 extensions too.
Time to embrace the future!
Sybreon Ones Nought 