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While KDE 4.0 did not meet everyone’s expectations, most recognized its potential to become the desktop platform of the future. KDE 4.1, the first beta of which was released earlier today, builds on the excellent base of KDE 4.0. KDE 4.0 promised a relatively fixed API and was geared towards developers, but KDE 4.1 is for consumers.

In particular, the announcement from the KDE team noted:

• Greatly expanded desktop shell functionality and configurability
• KDE Personal Information Management suite ported to KDE 4
• Many new and newly ported applications

Most notably, Plasma has matured greatly and has gained new features such as resizable panels and more desktop effects. More KDE 3 applications have been ported to KDE 4 and many existing KDE 4 applications have been improved. In particular, Dolphin now supports tabs, Konqueror now has many new features, and the printing applet has been completely redone.

Not all changes are immediately visible, however. Many of the frameworks that KDE 4 uses have also been improved. KHTML is now faster due to anticipatory resource loading, and WebKit is now included and allows for Mac OS X dashboard widget integration. Plasma itself has become more stable due to new features in Qt 4.4.

While the final release of KDE 4.1 won’t be until July 29th, the KDE team urges consumers to try this beta version and report bugs. Debian has precompiled packages in the experimental repository, while Kubuntu packages are in preparation as of now.

Read more at kde.org.

(edited 05/28/2008)

The word is out that Kubuntu packages are being built and should be ready by Friday; thanks, Richard!