The first beta release of KDE 4.2, the next major version in the KDE 4 series, was made available for download last week. Thousands of bugs have been fixed since the 4.1 release and many aspects of the environment are starting to feel very smooth and polished. Although it still lacks stability and has some noticeable bugs, the new beta provides a much stronger desktop experience than 4.1.

The Plasma components that provide the core elements of the desktop environment are where you will find the most welcome and noticeable improvements. The panel system is shaping up nicely and has a few new capabilities that I particularly like. My favorite is the progress notification feature. When you initiate a file operation of any kind, the progress will be displayed in a notification bubble that pops up out of the panel.

It will stack progress bars for multiple operations and let you control them individually. This is really useful because it eliminates the need to have progress dialogs appear when moving or copying files with Dolphin, KDE's file manager.

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