New
#31
One of the nice things that most *IX did is 64bit and that was the norm in many cases. People would pick a *IX because there is so much support for (x64). Windows always seemed to lack in that area, all be it there is Windows XP (x64) but the OS never really took off. Why, mostly because of drivers if they were not built into the OS you really did not have much of a chance to make it work. I have run Windows XP (x64) for years on some production machines and for what they were doing it worked great. Microsoft tried to get users into x64 when Vista was released but Microsoft had bigger issues because the whole new way drivers worked meant that every vendor had to re-write their drivers. Since there were driver issues in (x86) there was no chance to push users to (x64). Along comes Windows 7 and most pre-loads are (x64) so many people believe this is the first (x64) Windows, when we all know it is not. Now that users are actually using (x64) it is putting pressure on the *IX community to do (x64) better. The issues in *IX (x64) are now more apparent because you have a (x64) Windows to compare it to. Now that Windows can do things a *IX (x64) cannot do we start to feel like *IX is broken. I am sure the *IX community will resolve all the (x64) issues as time goes on.