Yeah, as magico13 said I use 64bit KSP because I like to use A LOT of mods and when I was modding manually, it always was a huge pain to update them manually. CKAN has been a huge life saver for updating.
As for finding compatible mods, I usually have my browser and CKAN running side by side, and search for mods on Curse/SpaceDock/the forum and when I find one, I then search on CKAN and install. I haven't ran into the problem of a mod that I was interested in NOT being on CKAN.