A Proposal To Go 64-bit Only With Fedora 23

[Chewi]

Surprised that after 7 pages, no one has remembered that the later Pentium 4s actually were 64-bit. I ran my first 64-bit Gentoo system on one.

[Cyber Killer]

Surprised that after 7 pages, no one has remembered that the later Pentium 4s actually were 64-bit. I ran my first 64-bit Gentoo system on one.

But a lot later cpus were not, P4 is not the sole point of this discussion ;-).

[dungeon]

Surprised that after 7 pages, no one has remembered that the later Pentium 4s actually were 64-bit. I ran my first 64-bit Gentoo system on one.

That one and Athlon 64 had better to just drop 32bit compatibility, we will not have this problem nowdays ... it is pretty impressive why even today CPUs still do that, why they does not drop 32bit support altogether .

[luigide]

i just think it will be better that bleeding edge distros should drop 32b.

terms of efficiency in resource use , development rate etc.

At least fedora and arch should drop 32b support at most within a year.

But courage is key.

[Cyber Killer]

That one and Athlon 64 had better to just drop 32bit compatibility, we will not have this problem nowdays ... it is pretty impressive why even today CPUs still do that, why they does not drop 32bit support altogether .

If they would, then they'd end up the way that alpha and ppc did - in history :-P. The x86 compatibility was the thing that made amd64 win over intels 64bit variant. Backward compatibility is the main strength of the whole x86 family, other platforms got pushed aside even if they were better at certain tasks, because they weren't backward compatible. Legacy software is a huge force... Currently it's the thing that drives windows dominance on the desktop.

[Alejandro Nova]

And guess what...? Your Intel Core 2 Duo is 64bit! If referencing Wikipedia, the last 32bit processor made by Intel was of the Netburst Architecture in 2004. First 64bit processors appeared in 2003. I think a chip that's 12 years old wouldn't cost much nowadays, would it? Heck, we have boards coming out with descent specs that are sub-50$ price range. Your argument is dead in the water. Just wasted cycles on an architecture that should have been retired a whie ago.

My desktop computer is a Core 2 Duo E4400 (Allendale, the very first batch of Core 2 Duos). 6 year old too. And runs Fedora 21, 64 bits. So I agree.

[lysbleu]

Why is everyone acting as if fedora 32bit will disappear ? It will become a secondary architecture, so unless no one want to take care of it it will still exist, but it will be released a few days after the 64bit version, maybe.

[AJSB]

If they would, then they'd end up the way that alpha and ppc did - in history :-P. The x86 compatibility was the thing that made amd64 win over intels 64bit variant. Backward compatibility is the main strength of the whole x86 family, other platforms got pushed aside even if they were better at certain tasks, because they weren't backward compatible. Legacy software is a huge force... Currently it's the thing that drives windows dominance on the desktop.

Don't forget also Intel Itanium
Yeah, i know that it's still used in servers, but noticed the support is decreasing as time goes by.
Intel decided to discard legacy x86 (and let's not talk about the pathetic attempt to simulate x86 legacy in software) with it and look how that end up.

[rbmorse]

Does it have to be Fedora?

If the Fedora devs don't want to maintain a 32-bit version of Fedora, but there is a demand for a current 32-bit operating environment (for any reason), won't the community jump in and fulfill that need? Isn't that how FOSS-world works? That's what the free software evangelists keep telling people. Why does it have to keep the Fedora brand?

[The Walking Glitch]

Of course it's not worth it to BUY a Pentium 4 and 4GB of RAM, but if you have one lying around, it's worth throwing 4GB of RAM into. If you don't just run straight to newegg, you can get 4GB of DDR RAM for about $20. People are putting these things out on the curb pretty often these days. I actually got 2 Pentium Ds and a 1.8 GHz DP G5 Powermac for free from a guy who was just gonna toss them. Anyways, yes there are some motherboards from then that don't do well with PAE, oh well, you're just stuck at ~3.5GB of RAM.

Unfortunately for the Powermac, there is no Linux distro that's worth using as a desktop on PowerPC. The ones with PowerPC builds are just that, builds for that system... OpenBSD with its' hairbrained HDD partition schemes and kernel panics excludes it from being a viable option.

How many Pentium 4 systems shipped with 4gb of ram? Is it worth the time and effort to acquire a P4 system and then try to upgrade the ram so that it is sufficient to run a modern desktop, given that the resulting system will be less powerful than a modern phone? And remember that PAE sucked and many motherboard vendors never even certified their hardware to be PAE compatible (sure the old Dell server will do it fine, but random home build PC?).. Torvalds: PAE sucks

Those were Pentium&Celeron Ds.

Surprised that after 7 pages, no one has remembered that the later Pentium 4s actually were 64-bit. I ran my first 64-bit Gentoo system on one.