Last time, about a year ago, I had a somewhat bad experience with 64 bit linux platform. There were a lot of workarounds I had to do to get things working, a lot of which involved installing 32 bit libraries. Finally, the fact that it was using up double the usual memory, as expected of 64bit, was not worth the trouble of running a limping 32/64 hybrid. So all this time i've been on an old 32 bit. However, last weekend I felt adventurous and thought I'd give it a try.
I needed an OS reinstall anyway since it was really buggy with all the experiments and playing around i did. Installation was uneventful and personally I consider it the least important part of the distro experience so I'll mention it last. What I want to make a note of is multimedia.
Back in 32 bit flash has a horribly annoying sound problem: once a flash plug-in was activated in the browser no other application could produce sound until all the browser processes were killed. I saw a few workarounds and fixes for it but never had enough motivation to go through them. And why should something like this need a workaround in the first place? To add to the already bad enough problem, there is yet another issue. Sound breaks up when moving mouse over different elements on the page, even when in different tab. All in all, every time I had to specially dedicate time to view flash enabled pages so as to not disrupt my work flow. Getting to pages with unexpected flash banners was extra frustrating. Yet another annoyance came from the fact that flash would always stay on top of all components on the page. If there was like a drop down menu above it, its fly-outs would be covered by the flash container with no way to see whats behind.
Thankfully, there is now a native 64 bit flash plugin and java so if I am to go x86_64, there will be no need for those awkward workarounds to get them working.
This has been true for a while now, but I would still like to point out how easy it is now to install browser plug-ins from package manager. Flash, Java and mplayer are installed with no brain-work at all just by selecting them from the package manager. You do not even need to restart the browser!!
So what was the result after getting these plug-ins in 64bit? To my extremely pleasant surprise, which was pleasant enough to take my mind off of my personal drama for a bit, flash worked with absolutely no glitches. Once I added my user to sound group, I was able to enjoy sound in any application at any time regardless of the order they were opened. So that means I can use smplayer after youtube without having to restart firefox and reopen GMail tab. Breaking sound while moving mouse around also got fixed. Finally, a web multimedia experience without frustration.
I also mentioned mplayer in previous paragraph. Deal is that somehow i could never get mplayer plugins to work properly in a browser no matter what codecs I installed and where. Play back would always stop after few seconds of attempt. Now, mplayer-plugin package has some magic in it that makes any media format, even ones from microsoft media player for streaming(!!!) play without a glitch.
Thus far my experience 64bit proved to be not only a good alternative for 32 bit but an improvement. Only thing I can complain about is that my 1Gb of RAM is not meant for 64bit but getting things like memory in this cursed country, Bahamas, is not an easy option.
Another little toy I was playing around with is cairo-dock. I never had good experience with docks (avant, cairo or whatever else) because they always crash on me and have horrible video performance. Latest cairo dock actually works. Visuals do not break, it does not crash and is customizable enough to have a relatively productive working experience. After trying it back in 32bit I found myself really enjoying it. Until I felt slowed down by it. My biggest problem that I can recall is that applications that are added to the launch buttons do not work well with multiple windows. For example, if i open more than one instance of an app, i can click on it on the dock and the icon expands to display a list of windows. Not so if that app has an icon for it in the dock launch already. So it is very difficult to find window you need. Also, some applications like firefox (if i recall correctly) do not even create an icon in the "currently running" area. Instead, the launcher just gets a black arrow underneath. At first i thought it was just cairo dock being buggy. But recently i had a few encounters with MAC OS X. After fiddling around with a commercial quality dock I found facing more or less the same set of problems. With that, I came to a conclusion that docks are not for me. Once I got my 64bit Arch running, I stayed with the regular task bar. It may not look as appealing and attractive but I feel more productive.
I tend to skip installation process in linux reviews because I consider them the least important in the OS experience. I think I can install basically anything (after all, I went through Linux From Scratch :P ). Its how well the OS handles my working environment that counts. But there is still something I would like to mention about Arch installer. Last time I went through it, I had to read through quite a lot in the Arch wiki to understand how to get through the installer. May be its just because I got used to the Arch way, but after the latest overhaul of the Arch installer and its guide, installation seems much simpler and smoother. There was no effort involved in moving between the menus. In fact, once one section was complete, the next section was highlighted to show what I should do and defaults were often good enough. The entire process was done almost entirely by just hitting "enter" all the way through, compared to the last install, almost like any other graphical distro out there. At first I got afraid that the Arch was is being lost. But its not (at least at the moment). What really happened, was that the installer became much more organized. There is still a section to edit config files manually just that its more natural to get through it all.
So Arch way is still there. There is no wizard and all the system configs are still right there for you to mess with. What did create a problem is Arch's way of dealing with errors, or rather lack of thereof. I had bad luck to select a bad mirror. There were many time outs and most of packages came in corrupted all of which generated many "segmentation fault" errors. Every time there was such an error, installer would crash with error message breaking the layout so it was an unreadable mesh of blue, black and white. Packman database would also lock up and I had to delete its lck file to get anywhere. In the end I had to restart the whole process because it was screwed up so badly that switching a mirror didnt fix anything. I think this is something Arch folks really need to look into.
So here I am enjoying my x86_64 setup. Just about every product out there supports 64bit. Including Aptana and Eclipse who have a 64bit package starting from a few weeks back. Only problem guy is Zend Studio. Even after Eclipse began supporting 64bit, they still released the latest version 7 for 32bit only. I heard of a workaround involving bypassing installer and extracting the program manually or something like that, but its still not the way. Other than that, if you have a 64 bit processor, there is really no reason why you should still use 32 bit.
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