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Some distribution disagreements

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 13:38 UTC (Thu) by nhasan (subscriber, #1699)
Parent article: Some distribution disagreements

"it is also the only mail client with its particular combination of email and calendar features"

Jon...are you really serious? I think you did a review of Kontact a few months ago. Please get out of your Gnome centric world. Lot of your readers are KDE users and developers too :)


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Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 14:03 UTC (Thu) by astrophoenix (subscriber, #13528) [Link]

ya, I'm kind of curious as to what features evolution has which kontact
doesn't. I would try to run evo myself, but I've tried to run it in the
past and have never been able to get it to do anything for me; usually the
fonts were weird (so all the text was white on a white background) so now
I don't really want to spend any time on it.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 15:02 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Having used both, my impression was that the only thing Kontact (KMail)
lacked that Evolution had was the Exchange connector. But in general, I
think Kontact was much more of a polished product, and despite its
(rather) large memory usage at times, it didn't constantly _leak_ like
multiple versions of Evolution.

Kontact also handled calendars properly; Evolution always seemed to be
too buggy in this area to use.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:02 UTC (Thu) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

Yup, I just have to chime in. I know there are plenty of people who's world view is limited to "evolution is better than mutt, and I used to read email with emacs...", but seriously Jon, you are the nr 1 Linux journalist on the planet!

Fact is, kmail was a perfect mail client at least 5 years ago (longer, but since I don't remember exactly, I'll leave it at that). Even when the KDE calendar was a separate app, Kmail had all the features an old Eudora user would expect, combined with all the features a UNIX user would expect like good keyboard navigation, paranoid about HTML mail, not trying to send HTML mail despite your best efforts, paranoid about attachments and whatnot.

I understand that Evolution was an important project for the man who started Gnome, but a graphical mail client was never a missing part of the Linux desktop.

Actually, this all reminds me of the time when Eric Raymond wrote a long essay complaining that we don't know how to do good desktop systems, and used printing as an example. When reading it you'd realise that he was using Red Hat (or Fedora, can't remember how long ago this was and am using gprs so you'll have to google yourself), Gnome and CUPS own web based print management tools. What next? Complain that there are no industry standard sql databases for Linux, and that MySQL should have more features from SQL Server?

K*

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:20 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Well, sorry if I've slighted kmail and kontact - certainly wasn't my intent. I (obviously) wasn't thinking about them at all.

Perhaps it's a time for an update of the grumpy editor's look at graphical email clients. With calendars figured in this time. I'll put it on the list.

Evolution's old "Key Folders" pane

Posted Apr 14, 2006 1:16 UTC (Fri) by mgb (subscriber, #3226) [Link]

If the Grumpy Editor ever finds an IMAP client with a panel for frequently used mailboxes so that one can quickly file and access one's messages - as one could in Evolution One - this one for one would be extremely grateful.

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