The KDE development community announced yesterday the first KDE 4.1 alpha release. Although the alpha has a lot of bugs and rough edges, it gives users a very promising first look at the KDE 4.1 feature set. We tested KDE 4.1 by installing it from Stephan Binner's openSUSE LiveCD, which is available for download from his web site.

The open-source KDE desktop environment is built on top of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit. One of the most significant changes in KDE 4.1 is the adoption of Qt 4.4, a new version of the toolkit which includes important features such as a built-in WebKit-based HTML rendering widget and support for placing widgets on canvases. These features will bring some new capabilities to KDE's Plasma desktop shell.

Although the number of plasmoids has grown a bit since the initial release, the third-party plasmoid scene isn't very diverse yet.

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