Valve Reveals More Steam Linux Distribution Details

[curaga]

Have you tried running any common desktop apps on that configuration? You can't even have a decent browsing experience on that since you'll negate any gains on the CPU side with the massive amount of paging out to the HDD.

The common overhead of 64bit is quoted as 10% more RAM/binary size. If 10% pushes your browser over to swap, that just means you need to switch to a 10% more efficient browser

(Number could be higher for browsers, if you have links please share.)

[JanC]

Netbooks...
Almost all up until quite recently, and even now a significant proportion of the damn things.
Admittedly a lot have PowerVR graphics and are a nuisance to use Linux on anyway, but there are still a lot of potential and actual users there.

Even on netbooks that have a 64-bit CPU you probably don't want a 64-bit OS, as they usually only have 1 GiB of RAM (and part of that is unavailable because it's used by the GPU).

[JanC]

Try installing 32 bit boost libs in a 64 bit ubuntu. That's their multi arch support. (On archlinux it simply goes in /usr/lib32 and it works.)

AFAIK the Boost library packages haven't implemented multiarch yet, but once somebody does that, it should be possible to install i386/amd64/armhf/etc. packages in parallel... (I'd expect more work on multiarch after Debian 7 gets released.)

[Bucic]

blah fuckity blah blah...

Well said

[VoodooSyxx]

What benefits does a 64bit OS have over a 32bit PAE enabled kernel ???

Glad somebody asked that, actually. As has been already stated PAE adds a lot of unnecessary overhead. More importantly though, PAE or not, a 32bit application can never access more than 2GB of RAM. Depending on what you do with your desktop, you may not care. On a server though, with things like MySQL that need to be pushed into RAM as much as possible, that absolutely sucks. Anyway, PAE is most definitely not the silver bullet many people like to think it is.

[PeterKraus]

And in real life on a laptop that would be?
Not measurable..., yes, that's what I was seeking for

You're an idiot.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1210_3264&num=1

[Kirurgs]

PAE is a hack that adds a lot of overhead.

And in real life on a laptop that would be?
Not measurable..., yes, that's what I was seeking for

[GreatEmerald]

What benefits does a 64bit OS have over a 32bit PAE enabled kernel ???

PAE is a hack that adds a lot of overhead.

[DDF420]

What's the benefit of 64bit if you have less than 4GB RAM on your system?

What benefits does a 64bit OS have over a 32bit PAE enabled kernel ???

[duby229]

well what we're taking issue with is your statement of us having Ubuntu to thank for bringing it when that's so very clearly not the case.

Otherwise you're right in that it doesn't really matter what it was developed for as it works everywhere.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that it is because Ubuntu exists that Steam was ported. Just that it was what it was ported to... So thank god for Ubuntu. If it was some other distro I would be saying the same thing about it.