Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scaevolus | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Arch 2-3 years ago because their x86_64 packages were minimal. Was this improved?

I've been using Arch for four or five years now. My current install has been around for three years, x86_64. In my experience, any software carried on i686 that built on x64 has always been in x64, though it's true that i686 used to get new builds first -- that has changed now and x64 usually gets new packages before i686.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see i686 dropped completely in the next 1-2 years.

What do you mean by 'minimal'? If you're talking about wine and flash, there are 32 bit builds available to be installed in 64 bit.. But that's the way it has always been.

I recall I had the same impression back at the time. Arch lacked multilib support if I'm not wrong.

I recently switched from 32bit Arch to 64bit and it works great so far, multilib included.

For the record Arch is one of the only distributions with sensible multiilib support. Most of the bigger ones require purity and force you to install a chroot if you want to run 32-bit applications. Fedora is multilib by default but it sucks because it always installs 32 and 64 bit versions of everything by default instead of reasoning that you'd be OK to use 64-bit most of the time by default.

I've been running Arch x86_64 for well over a year now, and I haven't ran into a package yet that that I needed that didn't have a x86_64 version.

I have been using Arch for a long time and I can assure you it has improved. Give it a try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com