I know that this has been discussed before, but not for quite a while, and life moves on.
My EEE PC died last year, and I have been without Haiku ever since. I now want to install it again, and am wondering which way to go.
I have a nice old Thinkpad T42 that I would love to use for Haiku, but it’s 32 bit. I also have a T61, which is 64 bit. Both would be quite fast enough for my purposes, but I am concerned that if I went the 32 bit route I would be going down a dead-end.
Thoughts?
Not in the short term. 32bit will be supported at least until the R1 release. And by then, 64bit will have gained the ability to run 32bit apps (there are patches doing that being worked on already), so you can easily migrate your apps to a 64bit system wen you get your hands on one.
Many thanks. The T42 will be the Haiku machine then.
On re-reading your reply, I realise that I misread it the first time. I have a 64 bit machine now that I could use, but the 32 bit is my choice, all else being equal.
The question is, will I be unable to run some apps if I am using a 32 bit machine? I will want as a minimum a good browser, LibreOffice, a decent picture viewer, and email (webmail OK), and I wouldn’t want to go 32 bit if I will have to upgrade in less than, say, a year.
All of these will be ok. The web browser will be slower because WebKit dropped support for 32bit JIT and also because our 32bit versions are partially compiled with gcc2. But it should work.
Even if my hardware (currently a thinkpad X220) supports 64bit, I still use mostly the 32bit version of Haiku here.