any drawbacks to 64-bit versus 32-bit install?

[Michael Cronenworth]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: any drawbacks to 64-bit versus 32-bit install?
From: Tom Horsley <tom.horsley at att.net>
To: Community assistance, encouragement, and advice for using Fedora. 
<fedora-list at redhat.com>
Date: 11/17/2008 10:05 AM

> 
> I don't know about "safer", but firefox 32 bit plugins work better for me
> in genuine 32 bit firefox with no nspluginwrapper. Of course you can get
> 32 bit firefox in a 64 bit install, but it is less trouble to get it in
> a 32 bit install since there isn't a 64 bit version confusing things :-).
> 
> Similarly, a 32 bit mplayer (from rpmfusion repos) will be able to access
> the windows codecs stashed in /usr/lib/codecs, if you dig up content
> for /usr/lib/codecs and you have funky enough multimedia to play that you
> need the windows codecs.
> 

I've been 64-bit only for over a year now. I don't regret it.

I use 64-bit Firefox with nspluginwrapper for Flash. In fact, I prefer 
it. Why? Why? Why? (three times, yes) because nspluginwrapper provides a 
sandbox environment for plugins. If they crash, Firefox does *not* 
crash. I can simply refresh the browser to try again instead of having 
to start Firefox again.

mplayer? Windows codecs? What are you playing? gstreamer-plugins-bad + 
gstreamer-plugins-ffmpeg are all the codecs you need. I've never run 
into media that required mplayer and Windows codecs. Aye aye aye, old 
habits die hard I suppose. Tom, do yourself a favor and dump mplayer.

In the end, you limit yourself if you use a 32-bit only userspace on a 
64-bit CPU. How? I suppose if you never need more than 4 gigs of RAM per 
process, or 64-bit binary applications, you're fine with 32-bit 
userspace, but why not use the full extent of your CPU?

Of course, if you want to read all of this from a web page, why are you 
asking this mailing list? Google works on web pages.