FESco meeting summary for 20090507

[Peter Robinson]

>> The only reason people prefer to run i686 even on x86_64 is because
>> "apps do not work", which is nothing but a myth.
>
> It's not a myth, but it's now (only quite recently) mostly outdated.
>
> wine has never had a decent x86-64 port, and still doesn't.
> openoffice.org's x86-64 version was unusable for a long time. Running
> Flash on x86-64 was a big pain for a long time (even with
> nspluginwrapper) until Adobe finally released a native x86-64 plugin
> (which is still technically an alpha, and really doesn't work as well as
> the x86-32 plugin in some ways). Java was equally painful until OpenJDK
> came along, as Sun consistently refused to release a native x86-64 Java
> plugin.
>
> Those were the major issues. OO.o and Java are fixed and Flash is mostly
> fixed, but wine is still valid.

I've run x86_64 with wine but the 32bit in multilib for quite some
time. x64 client versions windows until very recently have been mostly
pointless anyway as there have been very few native 64 bit windows
apps.

Peter