the go-to distro

[bmike1]

I'll tell you what I am thinking: mX-14 should be the go-to distro at installfests. It works fast on older hardware and I'm sure it screams on newer hardware. The majority of users apend their time on the internet online or in office applications. It just occurred to me.... how does this thing fare as a gamers system? Another thing..... is 64 bit that important for most users? You need... what is it... 8 gig of ram to make it of any use; don't you?

[Stevo]

I'll tell you what I am thinking: mX-14 should be the go-to distro at installfests. It works fast on older hardware and I'm sure it screams on newer hardware. The majority of users apend their time on the internet online or in office applications. It just occurred to me.... how does this thing fare as a gamers system? Another thing..... is 64 bit that important for most users? You need... what is it... 8 gig of ram to make it of any use; don't you?

Steam for Linux is 32-bit only, though you can run it on 64-bit. I'm sure many proprietary games are 32-bit builds only, too. Almost all open-source games do have 64-bit versions, though, and could run faster in 64-bit.

See benchmarks here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3264&num=3

The amount of RAM really doesn't make a lot of difference, though you can find benchmarks that suggest that PAE does slow a system down somewhat.

Where you do get a big speedup is in number-crunching, such as compression-decompression, encryption, video transcoding, 3D rendering, and so on.

[bmike1]

I'm sure the spectators were marking the hienea from the bench..... oh wait.... I don't think that link is right.

[Stevo]

Whoops, wrong link --this one is probably better: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 3264&num=3

I'll fix the first link

As just a general idea what gets. Games don't seem to get a big speedup, but other CPU-intensive programs do.

So, for the original question, it should be a fine gamer's system.

[joany]

A 32-bit non-pae kernel is limited to 4GB of RAM -- theoretically. In practice, it's less than that. A 32-bit pae kernel takes you to 64GB (again theoretically). A 64-bit kernel takes you to infinity -- almost -- 2^64 bytes to be exact, or about 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

[lucky9]

Where you do get a big speedup is in number-crunching, such as compression-decompression, encryption, video transcoding, 3D rendering, and so on.

That about says it all. If you encrypt a disk/partition you might want to do some testing at least. When I use K9Copy to backup a DVD it takes about 60% of the time to complete with a 64 bit OS as opposed to 32 bit. I don't do enough of that to make 64 bit a necessity.

[joany]

When I use K9Copy to backup a DVD it takes about 60% of the time to complete with a 64 bit OS as opposed to 32 bit. I don't do enough of that to make 64 bit a necessity.

Where do you get k9copy? It seems to be gone from the repositories. I checked around the 'net and others are upset to see that it's gone as well.

[lucky9]

My Daily Driver is Mepis 11-64. I still get security updates so see no real reason to change. It's solid as a rock and very usable. And K9Copy is still in the Squeeze repos.

[chrispop99]

Where do you get k9copy? It seems to be gone from the repositories. I checked around the 'net and others are upset to see that it's gone as well.

Development stopped in 2011:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=686504

Chris

[lucky9]

That doesn't mean that the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do. I really don't need any new features. There are some disks that it can't handle. That's not a problem for me. They are few and far between. I doubt that I'll ever (at my age) convert to BluRay or whatever is next in the format changes. Not unless they stop making DVD altogether.