Feature added by: Ilya Chernykh (Ansus) Feature #310238, revision 1 Title: Restore KDE3 as part of OpenSUSE openSUSE-11.4: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Important Requested by: Ilya Chernykh (ansus) Description: I suggest to restore KDE3 as part of OpenSUSE distribution and include the possibility to install KDE3 into installer. OpenSUSE is a distribution which is known for its tolerance towards different desktop environments such as Gnome, KDE, LXDE and gives the widest DE choice possibilities than any other distribution I know. This is specially important in the light of KDE4 being still unstable and of beta quality: Plasma still crashes, spatial mode in Konqueror is still broken and multiple features still missing. Inclusion of KDE3 in OpenSUSE could help attract multiple users of other Linux distributions which have discontinued KDE3. KDE3 is still widely used and popular environment, much more so than some others already included in OpenSUSE. It also helps easier migration from Windows as it offers familiar and classical interface. I cannot imagine a school teacher, office worker or a bureaucrat using KDE4. One of the reasons against KDE3 inclusion was that some claim it is discontinued upstream. But a look at the KDE3 svn shows it is still supported and bugfixed: http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/3.5/ The last commit being only 6 days ago. Since our 11.2 release multiple features were improved, including crash-proof, debugging, karchive, vcards, kmail, kcommander, kaffeine and the help system. There is another branch of KDE3 development, a project known as Trinity, hosted in the same SVN repository, which aims on adding new features to KDE3 and continuous development. While this project gives hope of the future of KDE3, I currently would not recommend including their packages in OpenSUSE, and suggest to stick with the above-mentioned vanilla branch. Maintainig KDE3 currently would not require much resources, since the most difficult step - adapting KDE3 to co-existence with KDE4, moving it to another namespace, renaming packages, is already accomplished by the efforts of Novell and the SUSE team. Most other distributions could not cope with this challenge, but this titanic effort is already in the past for OpenSUSE. That would be even more unreasonable to drop KDE3 just after the bridge is left behind. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/310238