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It is quite possible that once KDE4 is released, Novell will make it available as an upgrade. It has been the policy of SUSE/Novell for years now.

KDE4 packages are built regulary from the latest SVN sources for suse 10.0 - 10.3/factory for everyone to try. Just add the KDE4 repo from repos.opensuse.org to yast. It's just to early yet to include as the default KDE desktop.

I can't tell you about Gnome, but in Debian (and derivatives) KDE is in /usr. Such a thing is not unprecedented.

LSB has nothing to do with directories. If you're thinking of the FHS, it's rather more FHS-compliant to put the DEs in /usr. This is what we (Mandriva) and Debian do at least, I'm not sure about Ubuntu and FC.

FC/Redhat has KDE in /usr as well. I am not so sure about Ubuntu.

RedHat/Fedora based distros, too.

BTW, I thought FHS was part of LSB now?

At any rate, I'm glad to hear about it. Some distros putting things in /opt while others put them in /usr is exactly the sort of silly, purposeless, incompatibility that is bad for Linux, and with no upside.

Though to be honest, I must admit that I did not know that Suse had been doing this.

Yeah, you're right, FHS is part of LSB now, which means I was a bit wrong in my comment: LSB does have something to do with it, via the FHS.

You are somewhat incorrect. The FHS preceded the LSB, but the LSB includes the FHS as-is. Proof is in the pudding:
http://refspecs.freestandards.org/LSB_3.1.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Co...

Please make better informed comments to improve the quality of OSNEWS. However, you are correct that it is FHS compliant to put desktop environments under /usr like virtually every distro sans SUSE has been doing for years now.

I believe /opt first appeared in Solaris, an unholy and purely unnatural manifestation put upon linux by oracle and a few others who don't want to bother with the difference. That device should be mounted on /usr/local

I think of /opt as quite logical and I love Solaris for its business oriented approach. Normally /usr is for (programs, libs, etc) that get installed as part of the OS and can be modified as part of OS updates, patches, etc. /usr/local is for customer developed and built packages. They are in /usr/local and an OS upgrade should not tamper with these files. The /opt i smeant for third party (commercial, etc) software that will also not be affected by OS patching/upgrades.

Highly illogical, you want to segregate your applications based on where you bought or how much you paid for or by license? User software is third party and it goes in usr/local. Nobody needs opt, it's just oracle etc. way of saying they're better than you.
No Solaris hater mind you, still running 8 on my rusty trusty sparc5 here, heavy user since V4, I just never saw the need to add to *NIX already sprawling directory structure and still don't.

SUSE from what I've seen has never been about bleeding edge. They tend to release after bugs have been ironed out. That being said SLED is still using Gnome 2.12, where Gnome 2.18 is a month from being released. For those not savvy on Gnome release schedule math that means that SLED is using a version of Gnome that was released a year and a half ago! 10.1 was also using 2.12 at the time when other distros were releasing with 2.16. I'd be curious to see what happens in the KDE front, but I'm guessing they're making the assumption they won't have time to fix all the bugs and release a decent product. I wouldn't doubt they offer KDE4 in an unsupported unofficial repository though in 10.3.

SUSE from what I've seen has never been about bleeding edge. They tend to release after bugs have been ironed out. That being said SLED is still using Gnome 2.12, where Gnome 2.18 is a month from being released.

Actually, for better or worse, Suse does tend towards bleeding edge now as long as the chances of breakage are minimal. At least more so than the pre-Novell Suse < 10.0 seems to have.

SLED is the version that releases when the bugs are out, and that mostly comes from the initial bugzilla reports after Suse goes final; SLED 10 was based on the Suse 10.1 codebase, hence the older version of Gnome, and that's sort of by design for SLED. Right now SP1 is going through beta testing at Novell, and when released it will update SLED 10 to share many of the same components and improvements as Suse 10.2.

Suse already provides current KDE4 snapshots from SVN through the build service, so there's no doubt they'll provide the full desktop as an option after release, for all recent versions. There's nothing in KDE4 that requires an architectural change that would make it incompatible with earlier releases.

I suspect that KDE4 as a standard desktop will likely anchor Suse 11.0, and possibly SLED 11. Speculation, mind you.

For what it's worth, the release notes for this alpha say "GNOME 2 is now installed under the /usr/ file system hierarchy and KDE 4 will follow soon. KDE3 will stay in /opt for compatibility reasons"

So it looks like the expectation is that 10.3 will include both KDE3 and KDE4. I imagine that the default will be KDE3 unless KDE4 proves a lot more stable early on than people expect.

KDE 4 will not be in a ready-to-ship form for widespread use till at least March 2008, so Suse's sense of timing is very accurate.

KDE 4 is a huge platform change and will take a long time to stabilize. There will continue to be KDE 3.5.x and 3.6.x releases for a long time to come, because KDE can be used today and is, generally speaking, rock solid.

There won't be a 3.6.x release. If you read their mailing lists, you can read that they plan on releasing 3.5.7, but that is at least some months from now. They delay this release on purpose so that the focos of both the developers and users shifts to kde4. 3.5.7 will probably be the last 3.x.x release.