As you possibly know, the last openSUSE release does not include HAL layer which was employed by multiple software to access hardware components. This heavily impacted the KDE 3 users who became unable to suspend and hibernate their systems without installing HAL from a separate repository. Now, thanks to a patch developed by Serghei Amelian, KDE3 got the support for the modern hardware interface, Upower. The update is already published for openSUSE 12.1.

Among other improvements to KDE3 is the possibility to resize tray icons by editing (or creating) the config file ~/.kde/share/config/systemtray_panelappletrc with the following section:

[System Tray]
systrayIconWidth=XX

where XX is the preferred icon size. While in the previous KDE3 releases the icons would got cut, they are scaled now. I changed the default size of the tray icons to 18 px so that they could fit in two rows at medium panel size (see the screenshot).

I also removed the annoying arrows from the applet handles so they not to damage the common style. The applet menu still can be called by right-clicking on the handle.
One additional improvement is that kpdf now got the ability to rotate the document.