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Disk space requirements aren't obscure technical information. Providing it wouldn't confuse anyone, especially not anyone adept enough to install an operating system. It should be provided.
The difference between RAM & disk space continues to elude some, never mind megabytes versus gigabytes & now terabytes.
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Out of curiosity ... why do you use the 64bit version? Do you have more than 4GB of ram?
You probably already know this, but mostly all modern CPU's (within the last 5+ years, I could be wrong on some accounts) are actually 64 bit, so I believe and I might be wrong, you are losing some optimizations. Also its your RAM + Videocard Memory that is your memory, so while you might have say 4 gig, and it would seem to show up on your computer, its including your video card memory.
* You need to compute extremely large numbers. You'll get big performance boosts here.
* You need more then ~3.5 G ram. In which case you actually have to buy AT LEAST 8G to see a positive impact. Even this is not a hard requirement, as there are work arounds in 32-bit. But 64-bit is an absolute must if an individual process needs that much ram.
note: I see I'm voted down, and maybe I'm a little harsh in my comment, but can anyone add any other reasons to go to 64 bit? I've read a ton over the years and those are the only two I could find. Maybe I should add "because 64 is bigger then 32 and I can tell ppl my OS is 64 bit"
edit: Double is a great exaggeration, but not as much as the replies indicated. I moved from a 64-bit slicehost with 512M to a 32-bit linode with 320M and have LESS memory woes. The libraries really are almost twice as big. I speak from experience and not from theory.
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The menus and title bars look great. But open Firefox and and go to Gmail or something and compare it to OS X.
Even with msttcorefonts installed?
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> Providing it wouldn't confuse anyone You fail at UI. Any and all information always adds some cognitive load and confuses the user. Every time you think you should show the user something, you must figure out a very convincing reason why you should not just leave it out. There clearly isn't one for majority of users who are going to install ubuntu, and for the rest, googling for two easy words isn't going to be too…
Disk space is required to install the OS. The alternative is letting the user download the .iso, burn it, then try to install only to have the installer complain about not having enough space. That is failing at UI. The additional cognitive load of reading a disk space requirement is negligible, especially compared to what someone who needed that information has to go through without it. You haven't even considered t…
I might well be wrong about whether it's worth it to show disk space or not. I have no problem admitting this, because I haven't done any studies about it.
> but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.
>The additional cognitive load of reading a disk space requirement is negligible
Apparently I was too abrasive, or not abrasive enough.
NO amount of cognitive load is negligible. Ever. When you design a dialog with two buttons that both have to be there, both of those buttons are creating a significant amount of cognitive load. Understanding this is largely why apple makes good UI's. You should never try to justify removing something from the UI -- you must instead always have very good reasons why NOT to remove something, and remove it by default if you can't find enough (not any).
As I said, I have not made any studies of how users install ubuntu or what they expect, but as it's supposed to be installed as the os on the computer, in place of whatever that was before, and as there is no commonly available commodity hardware that it won't install on, I can easily see how there is no longer enough justification to show disk space requirements.
i done been on beta, it actually works pretty well and the graphic card compatibility is improved greatly.
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I use a few packages from http://www.getdeb.net/ and have several PPAs https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+ppas installed as well so there's some secondary lag there as those developers release new packages for 9.10. Which shouldn't be too long, really. My main concern with this release is the ongoing, phantom ext4 (and sometimes 3?) corruption problem. Depending on which reports you read, it affects 64-bit installations s…
Out of curiosity ... why do you use the 64bit version? Do you have more than 4GB of ram?
As the other commenter mentioned, there are the CPU optimizations to consider, but what decided my final transition (I've tried it out a few times over the past few years) was when System76 moved to shipping their systems with the 64-bit distro installed. I want to maximize their ability to support me, so when I did a fresh install on a new drive I opted for 64-bit as well.
Most of the problems of compatibility with 32-bit binaries have been trivialized or are routed around easily enough these days. Though 64-bit Linux was never as much hassle as x64 Windows. ;^)
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You probably already know this, but mostly all modern CPU's (within the last 5+ years, I could be wrong on some accounts) are actually 64 bit, so I believe and I might be wrong, you are losing some optimizations. Also its your RAM + Videocard Memory that is your memory, so while you might have say 4 gig, and it would seem to show up on your computer, its including your video card memory.
Absolutely wrong. I wish ppl would stop spreading this nonsense. 64 bit is actually slower in practice, since addresses double in size. It also causes nearly double the memory consumption, since all libraries become twice as big, so when you upgrade to 64 bit, you should actually double the memory you wanted on 32 bit. There are only 2 reasons why you need 64 bit: * You need to compute extremely large numbers. You'll…
1. It can provide performance boost if you take advantage of that 64-bit calculation (two 32-bit calculations) is done in one clock-cycle, you can actually achieve 100% speed up.
2. Use more than 4G memory is not a big deal in scientific computing, and let's face it, more memory is better than read from disk.
3. The argument about the double memory consumption is plain wrong. All program still use int as the main type, which only 32-bit long. Only pointers takes 64-bit long, but you don't save much pointers in your memory (what's the point of keep 4G pointers in memory anyway?). Thus, the memory consumption is little larger, but definitely manageable.
4. (This point may be wrong, please correct me) double precision is common for calculation, and it takes exact 64-bit long, which makes it more suitable for 64-bit CPU.
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Out of curiosity ... why do you use the 64bit version? Do you have more than 4GB of ram?
You probably already know this, but mostly all modern CPU's (within the last 5+ years, I could be wrong on some accounts) are actually 64 bit, so I believe and I might be wrong, you are losing some optimizations. Also its your RAM + Videocard Memory that is your memory, so while you might have say 4 gig, and it would seem to show up on your computer, its including your video card memory.
I was asking because I choose to install the 32bit version ... 64 bit packages are more unstable being less popular.
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You probably already know this, but mostly all modern CPU's (within the last 5+ years, I could be wrong on some accounts) are actually 64 bit, so I believe and I might be wrong, you are losing some optimizations. Also its your RAM + Videocard Memory that is your memory, so while you might have say 4 gig, and it would seem to show up on your computer, its including your video card memory.
Absolutely wrong. I wish ppl would stop spreading this nonsense. 64 bit is actually slower in practice, since addresses double in size. It also causes nearly double the memory consumption, since all libraries become twice as big, so when you upgrade to 64 bit, you should actually double the memory you wanted on 32 bit. There are only 2 reasons why you need 64 bit: * You need to compute extremely large numbers. You'll…
ints remain the same size, but longs and pointers are double the size. 64-bit libraries may be bigger, but there's no reason they would double in size. In general, a 64-bit system uses more RAM, but not double.