KDE 4.1 is Significantly Better than 4.0

From what I gather, the excitement level was rather low when KDE 4 first launched. Although it was a rather significant upgrade over 3.5, bugs seemed prevalent and not too many people were completely sold on the new design, like myself. I have never installed it personally to use on a day-to-day basis, but have used Live CD’s, and even then I didn’t understand why I should upgrade.

According to Ryan over at Ars Technica, KDE 4.1 more than fixes what was wrong with the initial version, and he even goes on to say that his skepticism experienced with the earlier version is completely gone. That’s quite a statement, and one that is actually tempting me to finally give in and install it.

I still can’t help but shrug off the new design, though. It’s glossy, like a toy. I’m all for eye-candy, but here, it’s almost like they tried too hard. Some of the features offered are fantastic though, so it might very-well be worth an upgrade for those alone. I just wish it was possible to keep most of that functionality while mimicking the 3.5 environment as closely as possible.

The most notable improvement is the addition of the folder view plasmoid which displays icons representing the contents of a specified folder. It provides all of the same functionality as the conventional desktop icon display from the 3.5.x series, but it allows users to place several of these folders on the desktop at once, thus providing immediate access to more locations in the filesystem.