[SOLVED] Use 32-bit Slackware? Post here to let the developers know!
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Slackware is what's running on my wife's 9 year old Athlon (32 bit). It came preinstalled with Linspire, which lasted about a month before we fired it. That was replaced with (in succession) Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora again, and Slackware. It's never *ever* run Windows.
Drop it or switch to a 64 bits. In a scenario where software is equally available to both there is no reason to stick to 32 bits. Unless you have extreme limited resources (incompatible processor or less than 1GB of RAM)
Hey - I have about 5 dell optoplex 280's - 3 GHz cpu, 2-4 GB memory, 32-bit (inherited throwaways)
You want me to throw them away to some landfill?
They are excellent machines!
Also have a xerox 625 colour laser printer - 32-bit driver only (ok, guess I can use multilib on that ...)
I just wish all software developers would go with 64 bits and drop 32 bits already. Then we wouldn't need things like multilib.
If you want to live in a nice ivory tower, you can drop multilib and forget about it.
But Slackware should be usable in the real world, that means having a 64 bit distribution with seamlessly integrated 32 bit multilib support is essential. Slackware i486 currently is the foundation of Slackware64's multilib support, so dropping it is out of the question.
Multilib will also stay much longer than distributions for native 32 bit x86 machines. I think, it will stay as long as x86-64 still supports executing native 32 bit code (on a 64 bit kernel).
Drop it or switch to a 64 bits. In a scenario where software is equally available to both there is no reason to stick to 32 bits. Unless you have extreme limited resources (incompatible processor or less than 1GB of RAM)
I tried on a 2G machine and it was too slow do do anything. Just running KDE and Firefox with a couple tabs the CPU fan kicks on and I start swapping with a plain Slackware 14.1 x64. With Slackware 14.1 32but I can run KDE, Firefox, Apache/mySQL hosting three small web sites and two virtual guests running Slackware 14.1 and still don't hit swap.
I'd need 4G + to get the same performance from a 64bit slackware, if we switch to 64 bit and drop 32 bit we eliminate 90% of the hardware running today as the resource hit was huge.
I run 32bit on my main all-around PC (not my servers) because on it I prefer to not reboot to Windows to play games. I find that 32bit is just easier and more solid for Wine and Steam - a lot less hoops to jump through. I know a lot of Linux people consider wine to be all but blasphemy but maybe they don't play games much. I, too, would dump it in a heartbeat if and when Steam or someone is successful at bringing solid gaming to Linux. Until that time, or until mutilib is not an extra burden with little gain for such things, I will continue to run 32 bit even if it means sticking with an old version and just upgrading kernels.
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