MX Linux Forum

I've been comparing MX with most of the lighter distros recently. Most all the ones catering to legacy systems and older hardware seem to be running 64-bit versions exclusively. I don't understand why this isn't a contradiction. ??

Examples?

It doesn't make much sense in my option, maybe people start to move to 64 bit and don't want to build 32 bit distros anymore, but it doesn't make sense for old systems. Some really old systems (or Atom based netbooks for example) cannot do 64 bit and 64 bit is a bit more wasteful with the memory than 32 bit.

I think that it's pretty certain that if you want to be able to be used on older hardware, then you need a 32 bit OS. A non-pae version is probably also a requirement. For really old hardware you need an i486 system. (Some of the BSD and Linux versions are i386 solely for compatibility with very old systems.)
I keep a couple of i486 LiveDisks (CD usually) around just in case they are needed. Along with a couple of i386 disks. Just in case.
My normal LiveDisk's are 32-bit_i686-PAE, as that will boot on all of my computers. They are also usually on DVD rather than CD no matter the size ISO involved.

Adrian wrote:Some really old systems (or Atom based netbooks for example) cannot do 64 bit and 64 bit is a bit more wasteful with the memory than 32 bit.

Well, it's more 50-50 with the Atom based systems - wikipedia has a useful table of the 32 versus 64-bit capable processors.

I'm running 64-bit Linux very successfully on a few Asus Eee PC 1015PX netbooks; these have the Atom N570 (Pineview). Certainly doing better than the 32-bit Windows 7 which they originally had, grinding away doing updates ...

Old is in the mind's eye of the be(h)older.
Old is older for old folks.
Young folks think that something made yesterday is old.

I seed torrents with a Pentium-I 90Mhz with 64M RAM that I built in 1995 for Windows '95. I run a very old version of Puppy on it. As you can imagine, it's slow, but so am I.

I run 51 BOINC projects on 8 machines built before 2005. All are 32-bit. All love MX.

Built my first 64-bit machine in 2006, my second in 2007, but was not successful at running 64-bit OSes or apps on either. Now I realize that I didn't give it enough RAM. But 64-bit was not ready for prime time then for other reasons too. So I ran 32-bit exclusively on all machines until 2014. This year I've built two 64-bit machines, and are successfully running 64-bit OSes and Apps. But, they are 4G quad-cores with at least 4G of RAM. (Hmmmm? Maybe 64-bit software was ready for prime time but hardware wasn't?)

I don't find that 64-bit software is any better or faster than 32-bit on any machine. It just requires more money, effort, energy, resources, and code from the whole computer industry and user base to do the same amount of real work. This is one case where older surely is better.

Adrian wrote:Examples?

Here's a follow-up to qualify my original post observation. I was going by the newest versions of OS's announced on DistroWatch. Looking more carefully, I discovered that the DW announcements almost always list 64-bit versions, but the actual Release Announcements from the developers *very* often also list 32-bit versions too. A tad of bias at DW?

Transcoding makes use of 64-bit well. Anything that's heavy on number-crunching also. For most of us the 32-bit OS does all it needs to, and does it well.
That said, I use 64-bit operating systems as my default. I do use and enjoy MX14.x as a solid choice for almost any PC. My Atom Single-Core loves it, as do I.

64-bit is definitely faster in video production and post-production than 32-bit, but the software available to do these tasks has improved greatly which has a huge impact on the quality of the finished product. I was able to encode a 1h45m video in about 9 minutes and play it through a projector to a video window measuring 15' x 8.5' with acceptable quality for mostly static or slow moving points, however, panning was not so great and audio sync suffered a tiny bit. Increasing the encoding quality to create an output file about double the size of the earlier encode fixed it and the process took a little more than 30 minutes.

When I first moved to 64-bit, I was seeing speed improvements of around 20% and nothing was going to pull me back into the 32-bit arena, but MX is just so impressive that I will happily take the tradeoff in speed.

I have a question that's slightly off-topic. I've only run 32-bit and 32-bit pae systems on my computer, but my CPU has virtualization capabilities (AMD-V), which allows me to install 64-bit guest OSes in VirtualBox. I assume that the computing power of a 64-bit guest OS is still limited by the 32-bit computing power of the host. In other words, there would be no improvement in performance of a 64-bit guest OS versus a 32-bit guest OS. Am I correct?

The question of 64 vs 32 has been floating around the Forum ever since I can remember. Early on, there were very good reasons to not use 64 bit as a lot of software was not available. That is no longer the case. If an OS is available in 64 bit there is no reason not to choose it over the 32 bit version if you have a 64 bit computer. If not available no reason not to use a 32 bit only OS for the average user.