This happens often enough it seems to be trend. I’m not the only one who experiences this. I found complaints on forums at Ubuntu and other Linux distros, as well as the Opera forums. It appears on all sorts of hardware, and the only common thread so far is Linux 64-bit.
When running 64-bit Linux, Opera can freeze. Not just the application, but it locks up the X-server with it. This happened with older versions of Opera on Linux 64, both with me and others. Apparently this is something fairly random. For some, it’s so frequent, Opera becomes unusable. Others, like myself, can’t seem to find a pattern. Yet, it’s persistent, more with with 64-bit than 32-bit. Something about the way Opera addresses the X-server is different than most other apps which have ever troubled me. Suggestions offered don’t help.
In my case, this is a show-stopper. I can’t afford to have this happen. It raises the risk of having a lock-up when I am in the midst of writing something, and I have already lost material a couple of times. Given this is something going back to my experience with early Opera 9.0 releases, I suspect there is something Opera does which is not quite kosher with X and 64-bit. Until I learn something the Opera folks have done to address this, I’ll be avoiding Opera in the future.
Sure as the world, some smart aleck reading this will insist there is no reason to use 64-bit for anything except databases and heavy graphics rendering. My response is something I’ve read in a couple of places from people who know a lot more than I do: The reason 64-bit seems helpful only in those two uses is because far, far too many developers don’t yet think in 64-bit terms. Given it’s been around so very long already, and is now the standard, and we aren’t all that far from 128-bit hardware, it’s about time folks took this more seriously. I choose to run 64-bit, exposing problems on desktop apps (let’s talk about Motif, for example) until developers start getting used to it. I strongly believe it hasn’t been exploited fully.
