fbsd-amd64 desktop

[Peter Jeremy]

On Fri, 2006-Jan-27 02:03:50 -0700, Ken Gunderson wrote:
>I've only run fbsd-amd64 on servers.  My favorite server ports all
>work great but not sure about status of desktop related stuff.  For
>example, I know OpenOffice has issues.  Any other gotchas I should know
>about?

Bare mozilla (no plugins yet), gnupg, mutt-devel, emacs, mplayer all
seem to work for me (though the lack of win32 codecs may be an issue
over time).  What particular tools are you interested in?

>Also that there were some thread a while back that i386 was better
>performer if you don't need the extra ram capability.  But that was
>also in reference to 5.x.  

I suspect this is highly application dependent.  Multi-precision math
([g]mp, RSA/DSA etc) will run lots faster in 64-bit mode.  OTOH,
applications will be larger (pointers are twice as big) and
(generally) have larger working set sizes, leading to lower cache hit
rates.  Your best bet is to try both and see if you notice a difference.

-- 
Peter Jeremy