Hi John; I have just gone through the same procedure and for much the same reasons as you. Maybe I have been tinkering a bit longer (sometimes makes me question how much productivity I have gained after all!). I am not a computer person but an assistant professor in wildife ecology using Latex and CRAN-R which made me look at a LINUX environment to start with .
1) If I want to keep the stablity should I wait and upgrade the distribution which will include the lastest version of KDE?
I have upgraded to KDE 3.1.1. and have no problems with stability. There seem to be some minor issue with printing and CUPS. At least I have had the problem that have been discussed on other KDE-lists. It seems to be related to how /etc/hosts is set up. I did get such problems when moving between department (DHCP) and home (local). My printers on my box and on the NT-servers at work are now working fine!
2) If its thought that it is safe to upgrade to 3.1 then what is the recommended method/route?
Since I had used debian for some time earlier I have installed apt4rpm/synaptic as suggested by Tom Wesley. I have even used it for a complete upgrade of 8.0 to 8.1 but had to do that 4 times before it succeeded. The nice thing with apt4rpm in combination with synaptic is that you can upgrade your installed software very easily. See http://linux01.gwdg.de/apt4rpm/ and feel free to ask me for help if you get stuck. I would recommend you to log into www.suse.de/en and download the base packages for KDE by hand and install them by rpm -Uvh ...... Starting with the libs and qt. When you have the base KDE going you can use synaptic for installing and upgrading additional software. I would leave out the directory 'xfree' in the apt-source list since installing xfree4.3 doesn't appear to be without problems.I have not tried it myself so I can't really tell. I always choose what to upgrade manully in synaptic and never go for a complete upgrade of all available installed software. I use yast2 to search for files that sometimes are needed by new packages but not installed. Be sure to close synaptic before starting yast2 to handle software. I have found Linux, xfree and KDE to be very impressive, and I am very grateful to all the people making such an joint effort to make everything work. Thank you all. (Although I am still confused why Kate will not apply when I change the selected language in the spell checking!) I do sometimes lack a discussion list for research applications in Linux. It can take a lot of time finding/selecting the software to invest time in. I am currently not sure what I will use for producing publishable graphs. I would also like to see a software that could do simulations as Stella or Powersim. /Tomas