KDE 4.1 Beta 2: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (Datamation)

To me, folderview is a huge step forward, not a "step back".  The main reason I didn't use KDE
4.0 (other than instability) was the dreadful way it treated my "desktop" which has been
cluttered with too many icons for a year now.  Now I have set up a "folder view" of my
desktop, which occupies only half of my actual desktop (I could make it less) and has a scroll
bar.  The place looks much more orderly now and I can even filter the view to see, for
example, only PDF files.  And, though I haven't done so, I can view multiple folders.  This
has made me a convert.  That said, folderview (and KDE4, particularly plasma) feels too
unfinished still: in particular, you can't seem to resize the folderview without maintaining
its "aspect ratio", which doesn't seem related to the monitor's aspect ratio.  And
resizing/moving plasmoids, in general, is a bit tedious.  But I'm sure it will all get sorted
out.

The author complains that you can't automatically arrange icons or plasma widgets on the
desktop.  I think the idea is that your desktop should not be so cluttered that auto-arranging
will be necessary, and should not contain file icons.  The folderview, of course,
auto-arranges icons inside it, but it would be nice to have options in the arrangement ("by
name", "by type", etc) and an ability to resize the icons.

The author says the missing features will make users "tetchy", which may be true, but to me it
seems the desktop is already functional enough for me.  My complaint is it's a lot slower than
GNOME, but I'll wait for the final release and also try it on a non-NVIDIA machine (apparently
there are issues on NVIDIA).