As far as I am concerned, I am more than happy with the way things have turned out with Fedora 9, 64 on my intel machine. Fedora has really matured into a brilliant distro. Updates run smoother than ever, and the package updater has been also improved upon - after years of sloppy performance.
As for the rest, I´m yet to find out.

Well, I made a switch back to i686 on my server. With the rest of my RAM lost due to dust and age (I started using this PC after a long time since I'd left it at my parents' place, and my dad was not too keen on using it), the x86_64 was performing poorly on this machine. The performance was sloppy, to say the least. The entire system was so slow that it was hard to work on it.

I made a shift back to i686, which are said to have better optimizations for intel machines, and things were back on track. The PC ran smoothly and pretty fast. Though now I've been burdened with the responsibility of having to buy more RAM for this machine.

Therefore, I'd like to raise a question here: Why did my 64 bit processor perform poorly with the 64 bit installation? Do 64 bit OS's need more RAM? Or do intel processors still have issues with 64?

Between post #16 and #17 you seem to have done a 180 degree turn. You will have to explain what happened. Some of the early 64bit intel processors were really not 64bit(think using a PAE kernel in hardware). I usually draw the line at 2gb. If you have less than 2gb you cannot run any programs that allow 64bit to shine, so I stick with 32bit. Between 2-3gb it is pretty much a coin toss. Over 3gb you run into the 32bit memory wall and that allows 64bit to start to shine.

Ram for that machine should be dirt cheap.

Thanks for the prompt reply. I see what you mean, and I now understand what the problem must've been. On the 64 bit installation, my RAM usage used to be constantly 400 MB+, and the system was sluggish. My processor was indeed one of the first intel 64 bit models to be out in the market. I understand that it's not really 64 bit in that case. On the i686 install, my RAM use was somewhere around 200 MB, constant. And the performance was boosted to a huge extent. Though this is really confusing.

About the 180 degree turn, I don't know. I don't have enough space on my laptop to experiment with an alternate 64 installation. And I want my laptop to just work. Moreover, I was ready to keep the x86_64 installation on the server had it not presented me with such a performance hog.

garydale: fair point, I was on an old version of Ubuntu (6.06), so maybe that was why there seemed to be fewer 64 bit packaged software.

to jLinkels: I finally got around to installing the 64 bit Acrobat Reader. I noticed that is one of Christian Marillat's packages and since I already had his repository (deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main) in my /etc/apt/sources.list file, it was a simple matter of aptitude install acroread to get it working.

Anyone using Debian who doesn't have Marillat's repository, add it!