Hands on: Explore the KDE 4.1 Linux desktop

Back in January 2008, the KDE project released the first version of its KDE 4 desktop environment. This 4.0.0 release proved to be rather controversial. The developers felt that the underlying frameworks and libraries were stable and ready for release but, in practice, most people felt that the overall desktop was unusable for day-to-day work.

With each month came a bug-fix release, starting with 4.0.1, though many considered the 4.0 series to be beta quality at best. Although opinion was divided, the KDE project lost a lot of support from disappointed users.

Much of the criticism fell on Plasma, the new way of handling the taskbar and desktop applets. As one of the most visible new elements, it was also one of the least stable. The taskbar had many regressions in usability; very little was configurable compared to the KDE 3.5 releases.

In the time since KDE 3.5 was released, the Gnome project had almost become the standard Linux desktop, being used in preference by most Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. KDE 4 was hyped as the next-generation desktop for Linux and other operating systems, and KDE 4.0’s release was ultimately a marketing disaster for the project.

The developers had stressed that the next release, 4.1, would be considerably more suited for general use. So the release of KDE 4.1, which arrived on 29 July, was met with some trepidation.

The question is, of course, does KDE 4.1 provide the kind of features that people had hoped for? The answer is most certainly yes. While KDE 4.0 felt overall like a poorly put-together desktop with bug fixes patching over the many holes, 4.1 feels like a generally solid and stable desktop with a few rough edges to be ironed out; something to be entirely forgiven in a ‘point zero’ release.

The aforementioned Plasma feature now works without a hitch, and ‘Plasmoids’ (Plasma applets) can be added, removed, scaled and rotated at will. The taskbar has had many improvements too, and its width and position can now be adjusted.