I wanted to be fair to the KDE guys since I poorly reviewed 4.0 final. I have installed 4.1 on Debian (from experimental) and played with it for about two days now. In short, it completely and totally rocks. It's stable and does exactly what it's supposed to do. The glitz is used sparingly and appropriately. The KWin XRender acceleration is phenomenal.

Plasma folder view actually gives, IMHO, the dashboard with a quick CTRL+F12 call up a functional purpose that anyone can appreciate. I love the ALT+F2 rapid application finder.

And finally, the Games module is really, really impressive. And they do it without 3D acceleration--QCanvas is flexing its muscles there. I'm a little jealous, actually.

Some rough edges remain regarding things like multimedia keys but other than that, I have no complaints.

Congrats KDE Team!