How stable is debian-amd64?
The port is being worked at since the beginning of 2004, and many people use it for both workstations and servers. The stable suite is recommended for servers and workstations, featuring security updates and debian-volatile support. There are 64bit related problems in approximately 200 packages. Most of these packages will simply fail to build, some of them will cause segmentation violations. Experience shows, however, that the former is more common than the latter. The vast majority of packages with known 64bit problems cannot be built at all. For most workstations, a 32 bit chroot is still necessary in order to run some common applications, namely OpenOffice.org, WINE, MPlayer with Win32 codecs and Mozilla with Flash. Nonetheless, a growing number of people use these ports on their desktop system, and are really happy with it.
