As Zonker announced yesterday (and I copy some lines from his message), the KDE team has decided to take the following course of action after receiving a great deal of feedback on the issue of KDE 3.5 inclusion in openSUSE 11.1 – and state of KDE 4.1:

• KDE 3.5 will be part of the DVD media for openSUSE 11.1, though space constraints may require to slim the package selection for 3.5 slightly.
• KDE 3.5 will be included in the main selection page under “Other Desktop Environments” (during installation).
  This way new users will learn KDE4 directly and those users updating from a previous openSUSE release will not see this dialog at all.  Those that want KDE3 to install anyhow will still be able to easy install it.
• We encourage and support contributors who are interested in maintaining KDE 3.5 for future releases of openSUSE, however the Novell employed part of the KDE team will shift focus to maintaining the KDE 4 packages for the openSUSE releases after the next one.
• While KDE 3.5 will be on the openSUSE 11.1 media again, KDE 3.5 will not be included on any 11.2 “official” media or repositories, but the community certainly has the option of creating live CDs with KDE 3.5 packages for 11.2.
• The Novell KDE team will only be addressing high priority bugs for KDE 3.5.x from this point forward. Again, this does not preclude community contributors from supporting KDE 3.5.x, and we encourage them to do so.
• We will work on an easy migration from KDE3 to KDE4 desktops so that settings and data will persist.  This has already been started for openSUSE 11.0 and will continue to get improved.

We’d like to thank all the people who helped provide constructive feedback while we evaluated the best course for the next release of openSUSE. While we know that no solution is guaranteed to make every user happy, we think that we’ve reached the best compromise for openSUSE 11.1 and beyond, to ensure a smooth transition. (more…)