Customisation

Posted May 22, 2005 17:08 UTC (Sun) by whitemice (guest, #3748)
In reply to: Customisation by odie
Parent article: Outlook vs Evolution vs Kontact: an e-mail client comparison (opensourceversus)

"It sounds to me that what you want is not a mega-application that does everything, but rather several small apps that each do one task well. These can easily be arranged any way you like, and can be individually replaced. Being a long time unix fan, I've never understood the last decade's trend of consolidating more and more tasks into huge applications."

Sigh....

I hear this so often these days I'm tempted to just be rude,

Both Kontact and Evolution are ***NOT*** huge apps, they are VERY UNIX-esque and component oriented. You can open an individual component, have each component open in a seperate (or multiple!) windows. In evolution the backend 'address book' processing is broken out into another process - the evolution-data-server. So it is very easy to write your own front-end using evolution data.

So stop spreading silly nonsense about the big-monolithic-Linux-desktop (either KDE or GNOME). Because in neither case is this true.

Customisation

Posted May 23, 2005 3:13 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

I have my wife set up to use Evolution; it is a decent mailer, definitely usable by non-geeks. But it is not in any way Unix-like, despite the use of components.

To me, Unix-like would mean that it's easy to pipe a message to a process (using a command line), or insert something like procmail rules in its processing chain, or use regular expressions. And while threading isn't inherently Unixy, it's the best way to get through high-volume discussions, so the lack of threading really hurts. The result is that I use mutt for real work; Evolution and similar mailers don't cut it, though they could if their designers would try to incorporate the best from both the Unix and the Windows worlds instead of just slavishly cloning Outlook.

Also, my main reminder that Evolution uses multiple processes is that it occasionally informs the user that one of them has crashed.