The developers of the open source KDE desktop environment announced the availability of the second KDE 4.1 beta release this week. This version has many improvements to usability and overall robustness compared to the previous beta. I tested KDE 4.1 beta 2 with a LiveCD build of openSUSE 11.
Some of the new Plasma features that were introduced in beta 1 are maturing and feel like a much more natural part of the KDE experience. The Plasma panel configuration mechanism, for instance, is more fully implemented in this release. I was able to change the panel width and height, change its position along the screen edge, and move it to different screen edges, all with simple point-and-click interactions. I was also able to add and remove additional panels.
Although the panel configuration system is in very good shape, there are still some noticeable rendering issues that emerge in certain corner cases. For instance, when a panel is against the top edge of the screen but sized so that it doesn't fill the entire screen width, the Plasma menu in the top right-hand corner doesn't properly render against the edge of the screen. I also noticed that the dots in the panel's vertical sizer handle are sometimes rendered too large when the panel is dragged into a vertical orientation.
The folder view plasmoid, which is intended to serve as a replacement for the conventional desktop icon system, is also a lot stronger in this release. This plasmoid will display all of the icons for files in a specified folder. It now provides proper support for drag-and-drop copy/move operations and for right-click contextual menus. It also allows users to drag the icons into arbitrary positions and select multiple icons with a lasso. This means that it now provides full feature parity with a conventional desktop.
The superiority of the folder view plasmoid paradigm over traditional desktop implementations is very apparent when you lay out several of them at once and start dragging icons between them. It's a surprisingly powerful system, but one really must use it to see its full potential. I particularly like the move and copy contextual submenus for the folder view icons.
There were some other subtle aesthetic improvements that I noticed in beta 2 as well. One of the issues I complained about in my original 4.0 overview is the difficulty of distinguishing between active and inactive windows. The developers have addressed this issue by adding horizontal colored lines to the titlebar of the active window. I don't think it's a particularly attractive solution, but it definitely increases usability.
KDE's Dolphin file manager continues to gain new features at an impressive pace. In the previous beta, I tested out tabs and the tree feature in the detailed view. This time around, I checked out the new grouping feature in the icon view. Dolphin now exposes some nifty Nepomuk filesystem metadata features, like file tagging.
Although there are still some bugs in beta 2, it paints a pretty clear picture of the feature set that we will see in the official 4.1 release. It's a very nice assortment of improvements and it offers a lot of things that were sorely needed in the original 4.0 release. For more details about the 4.1 roadmap, see the release goals page at the KDE techbase wiki.
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