The newly released Xandros Desktop Linux 4.0 is one of the few remaining for-pay Linux distributions on the consumer market. The Home Edition is available for $40, or $80 for a Premium Edition. What do you get for your hard-earned cash? Let's take a look.
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Member since:2005-07-12
>> I am really fed up. 64bit processors have been available for desktop PCs for 3 years now, and every new AMD and most Intel powered boxes which people buy are 64bit now.
I find it ludicrous that one can't take full advantage of it.
That could have something to do with the only place you see REAL gains is in raw, repetative memory copies - which in the age of offloading everything to the video card, alpha shadows and transparancy, and actually processing information instead of just shoving it around... The gains in performance of a 64 bit OS over the 32 bit versions is quite often not worth the effort of rewriting code to support it... Not to mention it can often be painfully SLOWER the moment you start manipulating data at the byte level (like, oh... parsing TEXT, encrypting a datastream, etc). (although with proper L1 and L2 cache that drawback can be negated)
Not to mention... ooh, 3 years. BFD - it took HOW many years after the 386 came out to get a true native 32 bit x86 OS? and what happened to that first one (OS2) again?
People often forget it's been TWO DECADES since the introduction of the 386, it took SEVEN YEARS to even have the first 'viable' 32 bit OS (OS2 2.0 - prior to 1992 OS/2 ran in 16 bit protected mode only). By comparison, 64 bit Linux has been moving at light speed.
...and it's not too surprising that the 'simpler' pay distro's aiming at the desktop haven't jumped on the bandwagon... Don't know if you've used any of the free 64 bit distros, but for anything more complex than a server (which is bad when a server is the 'simple' target) 64 bit linux just 'isn't ready for prime-time'.
Not to mention that for all the talk there aren't THAT many code level differences on a modern 32 bit x86 and the original i386... sure we've tacked on some extra opcodes (SSE, MMX, etc) but all the original i386 opcodes are present - that's a two decade legacy of programming habits and knowledge to overcome.
By comparison 64 bit is in it's infancy, AND we're still having a pissing contest over which codebase (IA64 or A64) is going to be adopted. Multiple instruction sets, massive existing codebase to be rewritten - and you're bitching at the three year mark?
Member since:2005-07-06
"and you're bitching at the three year mark?"
Well, Mac OS X fully supports 64bit. So should Vista when it it is released (probably rubbish, I know it)
The Linux distro with the most mature 64bit support is SUSE, but unfortunately it has got many problems of its own (the package manager...and many others I am experiencing here)
I found your post interesting nonetheless 
Member since:
2005-07-06
...I wouldn't spend a cent for a 32 bit OS.
I am really fed up. 64bit processors have been available for desktop PCs for 3 years now, and every new AMD and most Intel powered boxes which people buy are 64bit now.
I find it ludicrous that one can't take full advantage of it.