A new version of one of the two major Linux desktops, KDE and GNOME, came out today: KDE 4.1 While I don’t hate it, I don’t see myself switching over from KDE 3.5.9 either.

That said, I will say KDE 4.1 is an improvement over the last 4.x version. I hated 4.04. I disliked it so much that I suggested that it might be best to fork KDE into wherever it was that KDE 4 was going and restart major development work on the KDE 3.5 branch.

After working with KDE 4.1, the release candidate, for the last few days, I’m ready to eat some of my words, but not all of them. I gave the new KDE a trial run on my main Linux desktop. This is an HP A6040N Pavilion Desktop PC with its 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM and 320 GB of SATA hard drive with openSUSE 11. I also tried it on my Gateway 503GR. This system has a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA hard drive. On this system, I was running Kubuntu 8.04.

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