So here it is…KDE 4.1, the so waited new user release of KDE. I have to say I was quite anxious about this. After playing a little with it, I think I have something to say about this brand new version.

So here it is. For the most distracted, KDE4 was developed along on top of Qt4. A “start from scratch” in order to overcome some limitations and to design the perfect development platform. A pretty good job was done on the architectural design, by implementing frameworks for the most important stuff, like Solid, Phonon, Akonadi, Decibel, among others. This increases coherency and platform/application stability. I’ll try to make a more technical evaluation latter about each framework.

So let’s check something about KDE versions. KDE4.0 was for the platform itself. It was meant for the application implementors to have a stable platform to develop on. Which became KDE4.1, which is the first version for end users.

Now that introductions are done, let’s check a little some parts/applications that came out with KDE4.1.

Plasma and some plasmoids
Plasma is your desktop. Is everything you see when not running any applications. In fact, everything is a plasma applet, from the background to the panels. If you recall SuperKaramba, you can see some similarities. Plasma was meant to integrate the SuperKaramba functionality into the well designed KDesktop. The result was better then the sum of both, in my point of view. Data engines provide a Document/View interaction with the applets, so you can have several visualizations of the same data( a good example is the time data engine and the several implemented clocks ).

Now for some applets…

Panels
The panels are becoming quite nice. You can now resize and align in a word processing style. There’s a round button on the right side that displays the configuration bar. The button goes away as soon as you lock the widgets. Moving widgets in the bar is now possible too. While the configuration bar is active, you can move your mouse onto the widgets and check a 4-way arrow. You can drag the widgets anywhere within the panel. To move the panel somewhere else, just drag the configuration bar( not the panel ). Transparency and (auto)hide are still not available due to feature freeze and were ported to KDE4.2.

K Menu
The K menu was replaced by Kickoff, or better yet, a plasma port of Kickoff. Since I’m not used to it and I find it a bit ugly, I switched to the classic menu style. No points here except that Kickoff deserves a better makeup.

Task Manager
This applet displays the running applications. It’s not as good as the one in KDE3.5, but I’m sure improvements will be done ’till KDE4.2. Application notification( blink ) is not much visible, multi-line is not yet possible and the active window is not that obvious. So I think work is needed here.

System Tray
This behaves pretty much like the previous one except for the icon hiding, which is not yet configurable( at least by the interface, but I read somewhere you can change the config file ).

Background
The background is not working for me, since I have a dual head graphics interface. It works great on single headed. Better implementation is waited on KDE4.2.

Others
Other applets just work as expected. It’s worth to mention the “New Device Notifier”, that when notifies, doesn’t specify which device triggered it. Naming everything of “Volume” is not very friendly too. KDE3.5 was able to differentiate from USB sticks, flash cards, and so on.
The comic stripe looks pretty good, and so does the picture frame. The Folder View is still a bits low, due to a NVidia problem( so I read somewhere ). File watch has a little resize problem, since applets maintain the aspect ratio, I don’t seem to be able to resize the applet width only.

Well, that’s all for today. Next articles will be on the KDE4.1 applications.

‘Till then…..