Re: Debian 32-bit or 64-bit

Even Android/ARM is going to use 64bit as a standard... so I would use
everywhere (desktop/notebook/server/hypervisor/virtual guest) 64bit arch,
except for ultra-small systems, as a small virtual server with 512Mb or
Raspberry/embedded systems or very old system <1Gb of Ram. In many new
systems, like new netbooks/chromebooks (even with 2Gb of ram) it's almost
impossible to install the 32bit arch due to many EFI/UEFI troubles. So,
except very few cases, 64 bit to me is the standard choice for every case.
In your specific case, it' s a modern architecture, I would certainly use
64bit flavour.

Regards
ste


Il giorno gio 4 feb 2016 alle ore 14:54 Aleksandar Atanasov <
[email protected]> ha scritto:

> Hi Jos :)
>
> ​Yes, there are some performance benefits but it really depends on the
> scenario. Many Linux applications have lived a lot longer in a 32bit
> environment hence they are better tested than their 64bit counterparts. As
> for the minimum RAM required it's the same as the 32bit version (see
> http://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/amd64/ch03s04.html.en). However I
> would suggest 256MB minimum if you want to have a window manager installed.
> The thing with 64bit is that pointers require double the space compared to
> 32bit ones hence the increase in RAM requirements (this is most notable
> with Windows where you can see increase by factor 2-4 in this departement).
> A basic installation of Debian however (the minimum 128MB RAM is suggested
> for *terminal-only* installations; I've tried running an LXDE-based
> Debian on 128MB and it wasn't that great of an experience) includes very
> little software that accordingly doesn't blow up the memory requirements
> noticably. The more you install and run, the more RAM you will need. You
> can balance things out a little bit by adding some extra swap if necessary.
> I have been using Jessie from its first day of final release with XFCE on
> it and the memory footpring of an idle running Debian system is really,
> really great.
>
> Note also that on 64bit you can run/develop 32bit software using the *multiarch
> *feature Debian (any many other Linux distros) has nowadays. Read
> https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTOto see how to enable it. It is
> important to notice that doing so requires downloading the 32bit
> counterparts of all required libs which on systems with small storage space
> (HDD/SSD) would have an important impact.
>
> Regards,
> Alex
>