Choosing a distro: mixing 32-bit and 64-bit without a chroot

[encyclo]

Hi all,

I've recently bought an Athlon 64 system and I am currently running the AMD64 version of Kubuntu 5.04. I'm however rather disappointed with this distro due to flaky stability (especially with Konqueror), late or broken updates and the poor support for installing 32-bit applications.

What I am looking for (which may or may not be possible) would be a distro which:

- is compiled for AMD64
- offers KDE
- is able to run 32-bit binary applications without a chroot environment
- can run VMware, CrossOver Office, Visual SlickEdit
- has decent, timely security patches
- has good stability

Does such a distro exist? Perhaps Fedora? Or will I have to switch to an x86-based distro with a resulting performance drop? I don't mind either RPM or DEB-based distros, my only other comment is that life's too short for Gentoo!

Many thanks for your help!

[jaboua]

I heard lots of good stuff about SuSE 9.3 64-bit... TechieMoe probably knows about it