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I have a Dell Vostro 1000 laptop with an AMD Athlon 64 installed in. So, I setup Ubuntu AMD64 over it. However, I ran into so many problems. Flash Engine for Firefox occasionally turn to weird behaviors. Adobe AIR app report problems all the time. Chromium Browser crash very often when there are some Flash stuff on the page.

I wonder it is something specific to 64bit distro? So would I get less problems with a 32bit distro?

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I have no problem in Ubuntu 64-bit with Flash in Firefox or Chromium (or anything else really these days).

The trick with Flash is not to use the default (dreadful) 32-bit-plugin-with-wrapper solution, but to download the 64-bit Flash 10 ‘alpha’. It seems to have been called alpha to avoid offending the other platforms where there is still no 64-bit build at all, but it is in my experience just as stable a Flash as on Win32 (...still not perfect, obviously...) and way ahead of the wrapper fudge which Ubuntu are still using out of fear of the word ‘alpha’.

However you're still out of luck with AIR. There is no 64-bit AIR (come on you commercial vendors, I know 64-bit applications are still not widespread on Windows, but is it really that difficult to do a build?). Though it is supposed to work it looks like a huge mess and I'm not greatly surprised if it has the same stability problems as the 32-bit Flash Player hack. If you absolutely require AIR, you may be better of with a 32-bit OS for now.

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If you don't have at least 4GB memory or more, I wouldn't go for 64-bit Ubuntu as the headaches aren't worth it. A lot of the software isn't as mature as it's 32-bit counterpart as of yet but it is in active development.

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  • As the software is open source, it is recompiled for 64 bit as part of building the distro. I've been using 64 bit ubuntu for 2 or 3 years, and come across one bug that was 64 bit specific in an obscure application. That bug was fixed a while ago. May 24, 2010 at 19:21
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I currently have 5 machines all running 64bit apps and have none of the problems with flash in firefox or chromium. Granted, I am running Arch Linux. If you ever think you will go over the 3GB's 64bit will also be able to handle it. Now, if you are not crunching numbers etc and will never add more ram to that machine then you will probably not see much of a difference either way. If you feel 32bit will be easier ( only one way to find out :) ) go ahead and give it a try.

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