lau wrote:
not overhead, they take space.
Wikipedia wrote:
In computer science, overhead is generally considered any combination of excess or indirect computation time, memory, bandwidth, or other resources that are required to be utilized or expanded to enable a particular goal. It is a special case of engineering overhead.
Yes,
lau, space is one kind of overhead. So each virtualized OS I run at the same time takes more memory (active and disk), bandwidth, cpu cycles etc. which could easily add up to gigabytes with the disk space alone. When they're not actually running, it's just the disk space.
lau wrote:
These days, a 120Gbyte HDD is pretty typical, so a couple of dozen OSes?
That's assuming an empty disk. I've already used most of mine. (and I want to leave enough for defragmenting)
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I don't know what you mean by a "dual boot OS".
I'll clarify: A second operating system in addition to the one I already have and use (Windows XP in my case), which I would use by dual booting. You already mentioned multibooting, so I thought that would be apparent from the context, but I could have made that more clear.
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I don't know what you mean by "Ideally I'd like my OS to be 64-bit (I think)". If you haven't got 64-bit hardware, it's meaningless. The Linux kernel has been available as 64-bit since 64-bit started. Some apps may be more or less capable of exploiting 64-bit hardware. If no one has bothered to rebuild a binary package, you may need to do so yourself (or use a source-based distro).
That's what I mean. I don't know if the advantages of a 64-bis OS outweigh the disadvantages. I have an Intel Core 2 Duo, which I think is 64-bit hardware. I'm not sure if a 64-bit OS is completely backwards compatible with 32-bit software (especially drivers, which can be a pain in Linux anyway.)
If backwards compatibility is an issue it might not be worth it to have a 64-bit OS when most applications can't take advantage of it anyway.
If all the software works and
If I can run it on my hardware, then yes, it's a no-brianer. I might as well use a 64-bit OS because it has advantages, but no disadvantages.
I put it in my ideal features list because it could help to easily rule out distro's that don't support it yet (like Slackware.)
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"Removing dependencies" is an old chestnut.
Old chestnut? I must be unfamiliar with that idiom, because I have no idea what that means.
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There really isn't a "one size fits all" solution.
But there are solutions? I would be interested to know what they are (Especially if some could be easily applied to Kubuntu.)