I am thinking of building a new desktop machine and plan to run Linux on it.

Do any of the Distros support and use multiple processors like Core Duo and Core 2 Duo?

What about application sw, particularly for processing photos and video?

Thanks in advance.

I am thinking of building a new desktop machine and plan to run Linux on it.

Do any of the Distros support and use multiple processors like Core Duo and Core 2 Duo?

What about application sw, particularly for processing photos and video?

Thanks in advance.

Those aren't multiple processors, but multiple cores.  Linux does a great job on my workstation which has 2x Opteron 280s (four cores total).  Linux supports more cores than you could afford (4096 IIRC compared to the mere 256 that Windows supports).

Don't do photo processing, but apparently GIMP is heavily multithreaded.  Also I don't know about video editing, but video transcoding is handled by ffmpeg or mplayer or other no matter the GUI and has good multi-processor support.  Furthermore, using a programme like dvd::rip allows you to utilise multiple machines (like a cluster) and split the workload up between them.