Hi,
I am about to install Linux (i have not decided on the distro yet) on a new computer.
Here's my question:
Few year ago, i tried a 64 bit distro and had problems with flash not supported and a few other little annoyances. I just wonder if all these little annoyances have been fixed by now, especially video and audio codecs.
Should i go for the 64 bit, will i gain from it?
Thanks for your opinions.

Hi Davno,
I've been running 64bit versions of various distros for a while and not run any issues for a while now. I've run Linux mint, Ubuntu and Fedora. Also tried Mandriva, but I think it's lost a lot of it's polish since the Mandrake days.

Hope this helps.

Cheers
l1dge

In a word, yes. That is, presuming you are running a 64 bit cpu

Take the kernel: a 32 bit kernel has allowances for every dodgy chipset ever built since the last millenium. The 64 bit kernels can use k8-specific enhancements and leave that old crap out. Yes, flash, java, etc are ropier in 64 bit but everyone is working away. I grabbed an 'alpha unsupported' flash download and have never bothered to update it. Java I shoehorned in with a little trouble, but I had an early (bare-bones-type) slamd64. Most things are fine, and 32 bit stuff still runs. I also keep Fedora, simply because they have guys who sort that sort of thing and put it in an rpm, but I live in Slamd. (Reminds me, I'll have to boot it and fix Fedora one of these days - it needs a service).

java and flash work fine on 64-bit (except some flash crashes, but then 32-bit flash is not much more stable). As for codecs, there are enough for you to play say 97-98 % of all videos, but once in a while there's a video with a strange codec, in which case you may want to use a multilib distro or make a 32-bit chroot, and use 32-bit mplayer to play it, but this is very rare.

Been running 64-bit Linux for 2 years now without troubles. Adobe has a (alpha) 64bit flash client available, everything else runs just fine. (OR you can use nspluginwrapper to run the 32bit flash.)

Thank you all,
That was exactly the kind of info i was looking for.
I think will dl and install Slackware 13, 64bit.