I just put together a writeup of KDE 4.2, for all the Linuxheads here.

[backscatter712]

http://www.meldroc.com/?p=229

I just took a quick tour of the newest version of KDE 4.2. Release Candidate 1. Sometime around the end of the month, the KDE developers will unleash the official 4.2 release upon the world, and it will be picked up by your distro creator of choice sometime soon afterwards. At any rate, KDE 4.2 will include a bunch of new features, and some sorely needed bug-fixes. So, how does it hold up so far?

First, we do need to bear in mind that I’m looking at a release candidate. The developers are trying to tell us “It’s not ready for prime time!” Nevertheless, it’s good enough to get a good peek.

Desktop and Panel

Here’s where I’ve spent the most time picking at KDE 4.2. The desktop itself and the panels are absolutely the most important part of a graphical environment. They’re the first thing the user sees, the panel (or panels) are on the user’s screen at nearly all times, and the desktop and panel are used more frequently than any other piece of software. KDE’s developers have been lauding the new features of KDE 4.x, such as the Plasma desktop, Plasmoids, other desktop widgets, and so on. 4.2 does have some new features, and some new development tools - you can now write desktop widgets in Ruby or Python, for example, but how well does it work?

Enjoy!