

KDE 4.1 was released just days ago, but the KDE team already prepares the next release for August: KDE 3.5.10. While there won’t be any new features in it it will contain many bugfixes.



With the release of KDE 4.0 many users were disappointed about missing functions. And while KDE 4.1 is out the discussion still goes on. However, most users seem to forget that there is a perfectly valid possibility to use KDE right now without updating yet to a KDE 4.x release: continue using KDE 3.5. In fact, many business desktops and many industry setups with KDE do use KDE 3.5.x, and will continue to do so for quite some months and years in the future.

And this alternative will get another release in August: KDE 3.5.10. That is actually the second KDE 3.5.x release since KDE 4.0 was released, and shows how much the KDE project is committed to its user base.

Still, it should be clear what the policy is regarding such releases: bugs are fixed when they are either security relevant or when the developer in the project has the time – so as more time a bugfix needs and as less relevant the bug is for the general user base the smaller is the chance that the bug actually gets fixed.

On the other hand, since it is not even said that KDE 3.5.10 is the last bugfix release ever you can also try to submit patches with bug fixes or (smaller) new features to the project, and it might be included in a future release. KDE 3.5 is used on really large setups cross the world, and the KDE project is aware of these setups – so they will support them in the future. And besides, some developers even still use KDE 3.5 on some of their machines.