kallasoft

polishlinux.org has put together a great sneak-peak at the current incarnation of what will become KDE 4.2 directly from the SVN repo.

Overall 4.2 is looking to be a natural evolution to 4.1, which was a surprising leap over 4.0 from a user’s perspective given how disappointingly 4.0 was received from the end-user community (4.0 laid all the technical groundwork for the infrastructure, but still had a lot of UI rough edges that were all ironed out in 4.1).

Dolphin has gotten some minor tweaks and enhancements to make it a better everyday file manager like GNOME has or Finder, leaving Konqueror to be the browser (or advanced file manager for folks that liked that more complex interface).

Improvements to Konqueror include back-ported SVG support from WebKit along with KJS (KDE JavaScript Engine) and KHTML (KDE HTML Rendering Engine) seeing improvements inline with the WebKit work as well to improve rendering speed.

Okular has replaced KPDF as the default viewer for PDF, CHM, DJVU and graphic files.

Improvements to the Plasma manager and it’s embeddable components, Plasmoids, has been done but there are still instabilities there. Kickoff4 can be integrated as a Plasmoid and has some additional searching enhancements (that are a little wonky right now).

The author, Piotr, recommends people wait for the 4.2.1 release of KDE if they are planning on switching. This author cannot help but appreciate the irony of that statement given he has read that, and adhered to it, since he first got into Linux almost 10 years ago… “XYZ is looking awesome, but wait for the patch release ABC…”

As far as I can tell, Linux has been almost great on the desktop for 10 years, but continues to loose the battle against Audio, Video and Gaming which keeps it out of the mainstream every single time.

I also fully expect 100 people to tell me why I’m wrong… I was one of you from 1998 until about 2005 when I finally realized that Linux would never really be dominant on the desktop because it cannot deliver what the majority of people want.

That’s not saying it doesn’t deliver a great experience to some people… those people will post here rabidl about why it’s superior, but it still cannot deliver the experience that most people want.

I’d suggest waiting for the patch release