Although I never liked gnome, I looked a bit into its recent history. Many users seem to be upset that gnome2 was a good desktop environment, then the developers decided to create gnome3 from a scratch... causing features and settings to be lost (desktop widget support being one) as well as major changes to be forced in distribution updates. I only like KDE, but if I was a gnome user I'd probably be very upset if such happened to me.

This gets me a little worried, since I know some people would like a KDE5. Although any feature to make KDE more modern is welcome, I'd never want an update to remove any of the features and settings I use. I remember things were pretty smooth and ok when transitioning from KDE3 to KDE4 years ago however.

So my question is, are there any risks that the KDE team might do the same? And decide to make a KDE5 with major rewrites, release it before everything from KDE4 has been ported, and say "We just made a new version of KDE which is now default, next time you update your distribution you will lose support for this and that"? Personally I think not... but I wouldn't like having the experience I heard about with gnome3. So I'd like to know exactly what the vision of the devs is about releasing a new generation of KDE some years from now (if such is planned at all).

If you thought the transition from KDE3 to 4 was pretty smooth, then you most likely don't have much to worry about. See e.g.

http://aseigo.blogspot.se/2011/05/qt5-kde5.html

The current plans for Qt5 mean that, unlike Qt4's reinvent the world approach (which was needed, if painful), it will be evolutionary and far less disruptive. This is the good news.

http://aseigo.blogspot.se/2011/05/relax.html

The Plasma team has no intention, desire or need to start "from scratch" nor engage in a massive redesign of the existing netbook or desktop shells.

http://aseigo.blogspot.se/2011/08/impor ... ay-at.html

We do not wish to introduce anything highly disruptive, however. As with Qt5, we want this to be a mostly-under-the-hood set of work. We will be taking this opportunity to adopt some new technologies behind the scenes to increase interoperability, such as introducing a Secret Service implementation that can phase out KWallet. (Yes, we have automated migration code ...)

Application development will not be pausing as we do this: releases every six months of application improvements will continue based on the 4.x codebase. When Frameworks gets to the point where it is ready for serious banging on, then we will start repurposing our highlight applications to the new codebase. We don't want application development to be held up by the library development, and we don't want the library development to create much, if any, need for "porting" application code. We want "just recompile and test" to be the common case, with whatever changes do become necessary to be of the simple and even automatable sort.

If this sounds rather different from how we approached 4.0, that's because it is. The requirements, needs and context for this release are utterly different. We're after evolutionary improvement and broadening our developer ecosystem, and our plans therefore need to, and in our opinion do, reflect that.

That is good to hear, thank you. If I won't lose any of my desktop settings and features, won't experience new bugs and won't have any issues upgrading from KDE4 to KDE5 once that day comes, I'm happily waiting for qt5 and KDE5 to arrive

Just a short note, there is no "KDE5", only KDE workspaces and KDE applications that will be built on KDE Frameworks 5 (currently called KDE Platform). So while there won't be a massive rewrite during the transition to Qt5, it doesn't mean that individual applications won't see large changes - a recent example of this is KTouch.