Maximum PC

I'm guessing that even though Vista 64 and Win7 64 are just as easy to use as their 32-bit counterparts, I don't think Linux has made it to this point yet.

I tried installing Debian Lenny 64-bit yesterday. Installation was just as easy as it's ever been, but I couldn't say the same for installing programs and setting things up. I spent a couple hours alone just trying to get Flash to work. I was also trying to get standard Firefox instead of Iceweasel. This was a bitch too. They don't have a 64-bit Linux binary and I didn't feel like compiling it for my rig just yet.

Once I finally got Flash working, next was sound. Sound worked just fine in my Linux installs until PulseAudio came along. I can disable Pulse and enable ALSA, but it was a bit confusing the last time I did it.

Usually, manual installation in Debian isn't that hard. Flash is just a .deb file, and Java is easly. Ubuntu is much easier with only enabling a "dirty" repo and marking Java for installation via apt-get. Flash installs on it's own via Firefox. Sound issues still there, but that's only one issue.

/rant

Have you tried thisyet? I hear people grumbling about no 64 bit flash for linux but there is one. Granted it is still under development but it has been working for me for over 6 months.

extract the tarball and copy the plugin file to /usr/lib64/mozila/plugins and restart FF. Done...

I'm perfectly happy using Arch64 as my main os. Installing flash is just "sudo pacman -S flashplugin" and Firefox is in the repos, although unofficially branded (use firebrand to fix that).

The archlinuxfr repository has most of the extra niceties (such as firebrand) precompiled ( http://repo.archlinux.fr/x86_64/ )

64-bit Linux is, in fact, pretty easy these days. There's even a 64-bit flash plugin (technically still in beta, but works fine for me).

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

yea...I've had nothing but headaches with skips and burps with Pulse in 64 bit and a variety of tonics to try to cure things, most to no avail.

Only solution I've found with any consistency has been to start an audio file from whatever player I'm using.

If pulse wasn't so entrenched in gnome, I'd remove it.

Maybe it's just my hardware or something, because I've been having issues with my Linux install with seemingly little use. I'm mainly a Debian and Ubuntu user, but I keep finding issues with each. Despite my 4 years of experience using Linux as my main desktop, I'm still getting "n00b" issues like audio and video problems. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS doesn't seem to want to keep my ATI Catalyst drivers loaded, Flash keeps borking, and I get audio issues. I'm beginning to ponder yet again jumping ship for something like OpenSuSE or Slackware. (Yeah, I'm looking for a new challenge on the latter). All of our servers are work are Debian so I'd like to keep it around. I'll give it another go this weekend and start distro-hopping.