We were impressed with the big improvements in the first KDE 4.2 beta when it was released earlier this month. It fixed a lot of bugs and brought some impressive new features to the Plasma panel system and other areas of the desktop environment. The second beta, which was released last week, builds on that work and adds a lot of important refinements.

According to the official release announcement, over 1600 new bug reports were opened between the first and second beta releases and over 2200 bug reports were closed during the same time frame. The improvements have augmented the environment's robustness and restored some important features that were lost during the original transition between KDE 3 and KDE 4.

An area of the stack that has received a lot of attention lately is KWin, the window manager. The KWin developers have been improving compositing-based visual effects and adding some aesthetically rich capabilities to the desktop. Developer Lucas Murray published a blog entry yesterday with high definition videos that demonstrate the latest and greatest features of KWin.

"The main focus of KWin for 4.2 was, without a doubt, desktop effects. Lubos concentrated on card detection, automatic enabling if the system supports it and general optimizations of the core while Martin and myself focused almost entirely on the effects themselves," Murray wrote.