Very happy to hear about KDE Neon, but disappointed that it will be 64bit only. Although I understand the reasons behind the decision, I am not currently willing to reformat my hard drive and reinstall everything in order to use Neon. Are there any statistics showing that 64bit downloads of installs and isos are greater than 32bit? Up until recently there were still quite a few programs that didn't run on 64bit machines (or at least there were several years ago when I last tried a 64bit system.)

Congrats on the new project and I wish you all the best! Next time my hard drive dies, I'll give it a try.

I don't seem to have any issues with lack of 32bit sw, either there's a 64bit version or they use the 32bit libraries that are available - can you give specifics.

instead of waiting for your hd to die you could carve out a new partition or I would think do an in place upgrade to 64 bit

32bit vs 64bit is an old discussion that can easily be Google'd to answer your questions/concerns

ps if you use Chrome browser you will no longer be getting updates past March only the 64bit version will be supported

Several years ago Flash was only supported on 32bit, not sure about now. Of course, Flash is rightly dead or dying, so that's not really an issue. My wife had some software specific to her work that was 32bit only, and at one time Citrix wasn't well supported on 64bit machines. None of these are dealbreakers, just annoyances.

As I mentioned before, I understand the reasoning, but I'm guessing there are more 32bit installs out there than 64bit at this time, so supporting both architectures would broaden the adoption of Neon, which is something I want to see. Backing up my entire system (over 1TB of data) and then re-installing is a day long chore, and still some settings and behaviors aren't retained, so several more days of fiddling would be involved. I don't see that as worth the effort at this time.

Of course, moving to 64bit might fix the constants crashes I get in Gwenview, so that might be a good reason right there!

Flash works, looks to be a 32bit executable but works, don't know about Citrix but as most newer Windows and Linux machines are now 64bit I'd assume that it's not an issue.

I don't know why you'd require to back up you entire system, even if you had a single partition for both root and home (a bad practice) you just cut out a new partiton and install a 64bit OS into it having /etc/fstab point to a separate /home (being your old single partition). Obviously you're distro's documentation and forum would best answer how.

re: Gwenview crashes, you should post in the appropriate forum for assistance