This is repost of post I put on Kubuntu forum and didn't get much help.

I installed 8.04amd64 (on Asus M2A-vm with 2G mem 2.6Ghz Athlon X2) from latest alternative cd. KDE 3 version. Then had 200M of updates. Recently there were more updates, another 200M. Mostly updating KDE3.5.9 to 3.5.10. For long term stable this seems excessive.

There were originally several problems regarding excesive cpu usage, kdesu, opera pluginwraps, gwenview.

Kdesu goes to 100% cpu usage after some time, this seems to be a problem from many years ago but not fixed, apart from manually "kill kdesu"

Gwenview gets 'lost' goes to 100% CPU and just crashes.

Opera "Pluginwrap(s)" went to 200% Cpu i.e. both cores and locked the whole machine for a couple of minutes, was fixed before last upgrade. Now has problems again. "Pluginwrap" now goes to 19%.

Since update of K.D.E. 3.5.9 to 3.5.10

Kmail has problem with certificate from pop server, tell it to accept "forever" means till next mail check. This probably related to next item.

Kwallet nolonger works, has no wallets and can't set any new ones up. This problem seem to have been in existance for several years.

Ksysguard loses the plot of eth0 data transfers. Eth0 is there when it starts but just disapears. the graphs have some symbol on them but no info.

Anyone have any ideas or should I switch to another distro? If so which, if any 64 bit work? Why when you have little choice but to buy and use 64 bit hardware, should one have to use with 32 bit software

That's a good question. In truth it is more theoretical than practical. The 32 bit software works fine on the 64 bit CPUs. Even Microsoft is still shipping their 32 bit software by default. The only time that you have a big advantage using 64 bit software is if you have so much memory that a 32 bit operating system can't address all of it. You only have 2 GB RAM so there is no real problem with you using 32 bit Linux.

I'm using both 32 bit and 64 bit Kubuntu 8.04 but I haven't tried to do very much with the 64 bit computers. I recommend that you try 32 bit Kubuntu to see if you have better results.

I have recently read several posts about poor performance with Ubuntu/Kubuntu. I haven't experienced that yet but the fact that there seem to be several of these complaints in the last 30 days suggests that there may be a problem.

Thanks stress_junkie, I have a 32 bit Ubuntu 8.04 on same machine but have not used it much. I prefer Kubuntu but if one starts with Ubuntu then adds the K desktop I'm not sure how much of the original Gnome can be removed. Ubuntu is much more easily available than Kubuntu, i.e. 'free' magazine CD/DVDs. I haven't seen a 64 bit distro available that way. Downloading a distro on my slow net connection is painful.

The system has settled somewhat, switching users got it totally lost after a few times but rebooting cleared some of the original problems. I had rebooted after the updates. There is another load of updates to Kde and OpenOffice that I haven't installed yet.

L.T.S - long term support is nice but should it require major updates every month?

All I want to do is use the machine not spend all my time downloading either distro or updates.

I would reckon Kubuntu is based on the desktop issue, not the 8.04 LTS. We didn't get many updates when we ran an LTS system in the office for a while.Bunker down for assault by the slack fanatics.

ssyg00 I have a 6.04 LTS i386 on another machine and haven't upgraded it yet. It works. Again I don't recall any where near as many updates -- especiallly while still new.