Hi Everyone, I’m a new poster and this is my situation:
I would like to run Haiku Beta 3 on my Lenovo Thinkpad L13 laptop. I have already browsed topics about running Haiku on real hardware. I see that many Haiku users/developers like to run it on Thinkpads too. But there’s one question that’s not addressed:
If I’m going to install Haiku on real hardware, which option is better: 32-bit or 64-bit?
When I say “better,” I mean better in terms of hardware and drivers support. I don’t really care about legacy BeOS applications. WebPositive and a handful of new ported 64-bit apps will suffice :-). What I’m really concerned about is the drivers support. The stuff that’s usually at kernel-level.
So to paraphrase this another way, do you have better hardware/drivers coverage on the 32-bit? Or is it the 64-bit? Or is it the same?
Please clarify this for me. I know about the 4 GB RAM addressability limit with 32-bit, but it’s the hardware/drivers availability I’m looking at.
Driver support is the same.
The only two reasons to still use the 32bit version are:
You have a old CPU that doesn’t support 64bit
You want to run legacy BeOS application
Otherwise you should really use the 64bit version as you can fully use your available hardware then (more than 4GB RAM) and all of Haikus own software and most of ported software is available for both 32bit and 64bit.
It is possible to use more than 4GB of RAM with the 32bit version of Haiku as well.
It is the same with the exception of some old hardware from the 1990s (old AGP video cards) that you will not normally encounter on a 64bit machine, so no one could set up the required hardware to test it out, and the drivers were never ported.
Go for the 64bit version if you don’t need BeOS applications.
