Kubuntu x64 vs Kubuntu x32

Hello,
I am getting my laptop in a couple of days and defenetly want to put Kubuntu on it. I have Kubuntu on my desktop and love it. Don't understand why people say Linux is not ready for the desktop, everything works fine for me.

Anyways, I have used the x64 version on my desktop which has an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, in the past but reverted back to the x32 version due to a few issues. I use Firefox as my main browser and use the flash plug-in from Adobe. The Flash plugin at the time was not compatible with a 64 bit system. Don't remember all the details, but something to the effect that my system was 64 bit and the plugin was compiled to look for 32 bit libraries. I figured this was too much trouble and decided that I would just drop down to 32 bit and save myself this and future problems. A couple of years have gone by and now my laptop has the Core2 with 64 bit cores. What should I do? I will get 4GB of Ram and would love to utilize it. Does this flash plug in issue still exist? What should I do? Is going to x64 a big headache in Linux right now? Any guidance would be helpful. Thanks.

 

There isn't a native 64 bit Flash plugin yet, so you have two choices. You can install the 32 bit Firefox or try ndispluginwrapper for the 64 bit Firefox.

http://www.linuxheadquarters.com/howto/64-bit/flash64.shtml

 

I'd go with the x86 (32 bit) version. 64 bit won't give you any noticeable performance advantages except in a few extreme use cases.

 

64-bit flash applications are still not out for any operating systems as Adobe, in all their infinite stupidity and laziness, has no motivation (ie, money) to do so.

 

I agree. While I haven't used Linux in 64 it yet, on Vista x64 Firefox 32 is just fine.

 

So this issue still exists. When you say install the 32 bit firefox, how should I do this? I usually install all my programs from the repositories. Should I avoid that for Firefox and download the 32 bit binary directly from Mozilla and install that? If that is what I should do, are there any issues I would run into on a 64 bit system? Thanks.

 

It's not ndispluginwrapper. It's nspluginwrapper. ndiswrapper is a wrapper for NDIS compliant drivers for Windows to work on Linux, the other is a Netscape Plugin Wrapper that allows a 32bit plugin to work in a 64bit browser. Just "apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree" and it will start working for you on Kubuntu 8.04.

That said, I run 64bit Kubuntu on all my machines capable of it, and it works fine. The main issue is that the flash plugin periodically crashes, but that can be fixed with a restart of the browser.

He's gonna get 4GB of RAM. He'll need 64bit to use all of it. Really, 64bit Linux doesn't cause any problems, so there's no good reason NOT to use it if your machine is capable of it.