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. It appears to be tapping into KIO, the KDE filesystem abstraction layer, and seems to show any KIO-based file operation, not just ones that are performed with Dolphin.

The notification bubble can be hidden by clicking the associated tray icon. The bubble can also be snapped out of the panel and dropped onto the desktop like a regular plasmoid. I was very impressed by this feature, and I think it's a good demonstration of the kind of seamless user interfaces that Plasma was designed to facilitate.

There are a lot of other little features that have been added to the panel to make it more friendly. The task list supports a multiple-row layout and can also group related windows. These features work well, but still need a little bit of refinement. The multi-row layout, for example, is going to require some theming adjustments before it's perfect. The panel also gained support for autohiding, a feature that has been sorely missed by many users.

The folderview plasmoid, which displays the icons of files in a specific folder, also got some improvements in this release. Icon positions within folderview plasmoids will be preserved now. It is also finally possible to set a folderview plasmomid as the main desktop activity. Users who prefer the conventional desktop icon paradigm can get equivalent functionality in KDE 4.2 by setting the Desktop Activity Type to "Folder View" in KDE's Desktop Settings configuration dialog.

There are a few new plasmoids in 4.2, including a calendar, a pastebin uploader, a system monitor, and a file preview tool. Plasma has also gained support for displaying Google Gadgets (video demo here) and plasmoids written in Ruby or Python.

Another intriguing aesthetic feature is support for procedural wallpaper. Instead of displaying a static desktop image, users can display a slideshow or select a plugin that displays dynamically rendered background content. This is similar to the concept behind the DreamScene feature in Windows Vista. The current beta only supports static images and slideshows, but there is already an experimental plugin under development that will draw Mandelbrot fractals.

In addition to all of these improvements to the core environment, there are also a ton of little improvements to the individual KDE applications. Last week, I wrote about one of my favorites: the new Vi input mode option in KDE's Kate text editor.

I'm really impressed with this beta and I think that 4.2 is going to be a huge step forward for KDE. The innovative aspects of Plasma really started to shine through in 4.1 and they are even more apparent in 4.2. The software is available for download from the KDE web site. Packages are also available for OpenSUSE, which is what I used for this review. For more details, check out the official release notes.