I have been using the KDE 4.1 since it was published in late July. I have used it with both, nVidia and ATI videocards, so I think I have pretty good overview of KDE 4’s status with the modern hardware. There are many good things about the KDE 4, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

So let’s start with the good stuff first. KDE 4 has a completely new approach to the deskop: there are no traditional desktop icons, but the whole desktop is build of Plasmoids. In fact, even taskbar and desktop icons are Plasmoids. There are also mini-applications, Widgets, which are similar to Windows Vista’s Gadgets. All of these Plasmoids are easily resizable and customizable, making it easy to create a desktop of your likes.

There are also several new frameworks such as Phonon, the multimedia API and Solid, the device integration framework. These frameworks are mainly ‘under the hood’ changes and are not visible to the end user. Also, Konqueror is no longer used as the file manager, as it’s replaced by Dolphin. Dolphin is basically an update to KDE 3’s file manager with better integration of tagging, image preview and places. And I must say, it’s one of the things that have impressed me in the KDE 4. It’s simple enough and it tends to just work.

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