One downside of moving from 32-bit to 64-bit is that memory pointers are twice their size. In other words programs in memory require more RAM. But does it matter in practice?
To find out I ran the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 14.04 from a USB stick and compared the used and available memory in different situations on the same system when booting from a different memory stick with the 64-bit version of the OS.
After my initial thoughts about moving from Linux 32-bit to 64-bit I couldn’t of course hold back for long and decided to upgrade my Media PC I mostly use for video streaming from the 32-bit flavor of Ubuntu 15.10 to the 64-bit flavor. It should have been a straight forward reinstall, what could possibly go wrong!? Or so I thought…
Continue reading Hiccups While Moving To 64-bit On My Media PC
Yes, I’m a comparatively late convert to Open Source as I’ve only installed Linux on a production machine I used for everyday work back in 2009. At the time there wasn’t a lot of discussion about using a 64 bit version of Linux on x86, the mainstream was still on 32 bit at the time. Not a big problem, most computers only came with 2 GB RAM at most so there were only few advantages of using a 64 bit OS if the processor supported it. In the meantime a lot has happened and I decided that it’s time for me to finally make the move.