On 9/1/2025 11:15 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:
Reading some more, Debian 4.0 (Etch), released 8 April 2007, was the
first Debian with official AMD64 support.
Indeed, I misremembered: I used Debian's i386 port on my 2003 AMD64
machine.
It didn't have enough RAM to justify the bother of distro hopping. 🙂
My first AMD64 machine also ended up mostly running 32-bit OS's, but
more because initially:
It was unstable if running 64-bit Linux;
It was also not very stable initially with XP-X64;
Driver support for XP-X64, initially, was almost non existent.
So, ended up mostly running 32-bit WinXP on the thing.
Though, after the initial weak results, on my next machine I had a
better experience and IIRC had it set up to dual boot XP-X64 and Fedora,
by that point stuff was stable and XP-X64 had drivers for stuff. I stuck
with XP-X64 mostly as Vista was kinda trash (until some years later
jumping to Win7, and now Win10).
Well, and (at least in these years) Linux still had serious issues with
driver compatibility, so you can use the OS but typically with no 3D acceleration or sound (and Mesa-GL in SW mode is horribly slow).
At least Ethernet tended to work as most MOBOs had settled on the
RTL8139 or similar (well, until MOBOs started having Gigabit Ethernet,
and suddenly Ethernet no longer worked in Linux for a while, ...).
Well, Linux land often failing to provide a great experience, not so
much because of UI (and, I actually like using the Bash shell for
stuff), but because of ever-present hardware support issues (so, can't
usually end up running it as the main OS as much of the HW often didn't
work).
....
Stefan
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