KDE 4.1 beta released

K Desktop Environment project devs have made the first beta of KDE 4.1 available today. The goal of this first beta is to find any bugs and regressions, so that KDE 4.1 can be the version of KDE4 which replaces KDE3 for end users. The release announcement states the following three highlights of KDE 4.1. While KDE 3.5 had long been described as one of the best Linux desktop environments for users familiar with Windows, KDE 4.0 introduced a whole new look and feel. The start menu was completely redesigned and the desktop environment made heavy use of widgets. The good a number of KDE 3.5 applications were left behind.Now the KDE has released KDE 4.1 beta, which introduces or brings back the following features:

The KDE PIM manager, Kontact is back
Dolphin, the file manager gets tabbed views
KDE CD Player is back
Konqueror now supports web browsing sessions, an undo mode, and smooth scrolling
Gwenview image viewer now supports a full screen interface
The Plasma interface which covers the launcher menu, panels, and desktop has been refined
Dragon Player, a new lightweight media player has been added.

The final release of KDE 4.1 is schedueld for July 29. In the meantime, you can download a virtual machine image to test it out, or grab an image that will run in Virtualbox.

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