All, After my 13.1 laptop started downhill, (it's only 9 years old, they just don't make quality stuff anymore..) I ended up with an HP Elitebook 8760w. It's a whale of a i7 laptop with firewire for the DV video camera. Initially, I told myself it was time to try kde5, give it an honest go, and see if there had been progress made in the past 9 years. (using the latest git builds KDE Frameworks 5.29, Qt 5.7.1 (built against 5.7.1)) As my bug total rolled past 230 at bugs.kde.org, I had had enough. No more. When the simple things don't work or are more annoying than helpful it's time to find something that just works. It's the little things and lack of attention to detail that really detract from a usable workspace. Like the focus model not activating controls with focus follows mouse, the indent model in kate/kwrite wanting to think for you like a bad release of M$ word, or Word Perfect, multiple undo's being required to correct a single keystroke (really?), hit or miss kio functionality in mismatched file open/save/save as dialogs, and bugs opened years ago that remain unaddressed. This is where we were in June 2008 with the premature 'release' of 4.0.4, only now -- it's the end of 2016... OK, what now? Let's try Leap. Let's give it the same look that we gave plasma and see what is there. Where to start?? A quick check of http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE3 and openSUSE_Leap_42.2 is there! This is good... Burn a NET install for 42.2, pop it in, choose the traditional root account type install on top of a fresh set 1T of extended partition sliced into /boot, /, /home, and swap (the persistent btrfs default partitioning is a by annoying), but choosing the Expert partitioning, wiping the suggestions, and starting from scratch worked just fine for a good ole ext4 setup with grub2 to MBR. A quick selection of the minimal Xorg install (which provides a nicely configured icewm setup launched from the xdg login), a few edits of the Software selection to add the rpmbuilding and development C/C++ development collections and pressing 'Install' resulted in a solidly configured and fully operational laptop. Boot, launch icewm, grab the /etc/zypp/repo.d dir from 13.1, and a quick: $ sed -i 's/openSUSE_13.1/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/' *.repo $ grep "baseurl" *.repo and choose kde3, videolan and packman: # zypper ar -k -f <the urls> <the aliases> and finally: # yast2 sw_single (choose 'View Repository' kde - select packages [note: broken dependencies not pulling in kdebase3-workspace and kdebase3-session, manually select], repeat for videolan, and again for packman repos, click 'Install') # yast2 sysconfig (set default WindowManager: kde set default DisplayManager: kdm3) Reboot - bingo, xdg is replaced by the familiar kdm, entering user/pw and up pops that brilliant KDE3 without any complaint and the familiar and reassuring KDE_Startup_new.wav playing though the speakers. A few more hours work to move all the tweaks, color schemes, etc. that make the desktop, your desktop, and I can look forward to 2 more years of just getting work done, instead of fighting with my desktop. There are notable memory requirement and UI crispness differences between KDE3 and Plasma. Frameworks 5 gobbled up 1.7 GiB of memory before firefox or thunderbird were launched (2.02 GiB after), KDE3 needed only 280 MiB. Back in business. I can't wait to see how responsive this box feels once the nvidia drivers get loaded :) =========== G O O D J O B D E V S =========== Thank you openSuSE devs and thank you Ilya (and everyone else that helped on the opensuse-kde3 list) for one heck of a job with Leap and KDE3. Everybody has their favorites, but after using just about every desktop from blackbox to wmii, from i3 to sawfish, from e16 to elightenment to fluxbox to gnome, etc.., the dedication of the original KDE devs to create the most efficient desktop designed to work with the bare minimum of keystokes or mouse-clicks, with seamless and consistent menus, toolbars and dialogs used throughout, makes KDE3 continue to stand out among the crowd. (and I can again save screenshot to my web server via ksnapshot and the sftp-kio -- something inexplicably impossible in plasma/spectacle) Leap, refreshingly held no surprises under the hood. Aside from having to type 'openSUSE_Leap', the install looked practically the same as it did for 10.3 or 11.0. The only curiosity I've run across so far is the 3-dot trident boot graphic changing to literally "3 little squares and no trident" after the change from xdg to kdm3 display manager. (I haven't a clue what is at the bottom of that one) Don't get me wrong, there are some high points in plasma/frameworks 5. Gwenview is improved, and I'm sure there has been a lot of work for social media and 'activities'. (None of which I will ever use) Akonadi is just Beagle in disguise. As of konqueror version 5.0.97, you now have the katepart Advanced Text Editor preview back (yes, you can actually preview source code with syntax highlighting once again), but that is where the good news stops for konqueror -- this version does show promise, it can give you a folderpane view, but only if you manually split the window in two-halves, then 'link' the panels together and 'lock' the left pane. kdiff3 integration is missing, etc.., but it does show promise, it just KDE 4.0.4 ready. That's enough mental wandering. Good job devs, Ilya, I owe you a cold-one (or a vodka:) If you have given 42.2 a try, I didn't find anything that would dissuade me from making it my new daily driver. Good luck to the current KDE devs. The only advise I can give is make sure the little things everybody expects to work, just works, and works correctly. (It doesn't matter if it's Qt5's fault -- it still has to work correctly) -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org