Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 9, 2016 19:58 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Akonadi – still alive and rocking by robert_s
Parent article: Akonadi – still alive and rocking

imho, you could be describing thunderbird, not kmail, here ...

Cheers,
Wol

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 9, 2016 21:03 UTC (Sat) by petur (guest, #73362) [Link] (1 responses)

yay for gratuitous bashing....

(I have yet to see a single mail lost or a single hickup even in the last (many) years of using thunderbird)

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 9, 2016 23:59 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I don't think I've actually LOST email ...

But there's a reason I've got the "remove duplicate messages" thunderbird add-on - it gets very regular use :-(
(and that's not because I get sent multiple copies ...)

Cheers,
Wol

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 10, 2016 20:49 UTC (Sun) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (11 responses)

Thunderbird is the only email client that's managed to grow with me, from windows to gnu/linux, same data now for 15 years roughly, moved from one location to another, one disk, one partition.

kmail, on the other hand, has broken every major kde upgrade.

The concept of a near sacred respect for email data integrity, through changes of internal data handling, seems to be totally and utterly absent from the kmail/kpim project.

Since I rely on email for work, as of the qt 5.x changes, aka, kde plasma 5.x, I totally gave up on kmail, and sadly, also kde itself, except for a few programs that are still very good.

Since in my world, the fundamental purpose of my email client is to handle my email and not mess it up, kmail, which I had used for some secondary light weight purposes, became such a royal pain to use, a total time suck every time the systems it relies on were 'improved', that I decided to also just finally dump kmail, claws mail seems to get the idea of basic reliable email client for more basic uses, and thunderbird I've trusted for ages, and continue to trust. It's updates don't break things, and it's not trying to be clever.

I think there's a point in projects where the ideas and cleverness involved, sadly, exceed the man-hours/skill levels of the programmers involved, and to my eyes, kde has hit this point. I which I find sad, since it was a good desktop. Gnome and KDE seem to be suffering the same issues in this regard, and I think are a significant part of the reason gnu linux desktop marketshare has not risen at all, and may in fact be dropping.

Maybe it's best to stop trying to pretend that you can be the next os x or windows. osx is loved by its users, at least in theory, because it doesn't break things release to release. I know that's not achieved, but in user minds, it's one reason they love apple. The attempt to somewhat emulate osx desktops by breaking things fundamentally for users, then explaining why the break was 'good' and 'an improvement' does nothing to fix the break, and does nothing to retain users or expand the user base.

It's quite noteworthy that kde in debian sid/testing is a total mess, apparently some package maintainers in some distros are throwing up their hands and giving up. This is a new thing.

I like reliable, consistent desktops, and apparently xfce4 is the only relatively full featured project out there that shares this view of how my work space and machines should act long term.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 10, 2016 23:31 UTC (Sun) by smadu2 (guest, #54943) [Link] (3 responses)

"Thunderbird is the only email client that's managed to grow with me, from windows to gnu/linux, same data now for 15 years roughly, moved from one location to another, one disk, one partition."

Same for me (can not stress how good thunderbird has been for me in this regard)! I am still using the same ~/.thunderbird since ~ 2007. I have moved it through various laptops, distros, and companies and it just works. (My du -sh ~/.thunderbird is 37G). Well done Mozilla !

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 11, 2016 17:55 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I still miss Turnpike. If you weren't a Demon customer in the 90s, you probably won't know it, but the people who wrote it were anal about getting things right. And it had all sorts of wonderful little tweaks that made life so much simpler (like automatically sorting threads based on whether you had posted a news/email to it). Like having multiple email addresses per person. Like opening a search folder from the address book with all emails to/from that person (on all their addresses).

Etc etc. I guess a lot of that could be scripted into Thunderbird, but that's yet another system and scripting language to learn ...

Cheers,
Wol

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 12:31 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Turnpike is the only newsreader I've tried that was more agreeable than trn3. Sometime I must try trn4 properly.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 11, 2016 21:23 UTC (Mon) by dany (guest, #18902) [Link]

same for me, great tool using from 2002

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 11, 2016 13:30 UTC (Mon) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I would upvote you if I could. I know it's a very young DE project, but Cinnamon seems to be developed according to the same "if it works don't fix it" philosophy, with gradual enhancements.

Rehdon

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 12, 2016 6:53 UTC (Tue) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138) [Link] (5 responses)

I think GNOME is in a much better position, than KDE project.

I was a KDE user myself, for more than 10 years. For a good time, I held my patience and worked with the transition from KDE3 to KDE4. It wasn't really a transition, but more like forget most of old data/formats, and move to the new ones. Same applied to bug reports.

Back to GNOME, it is good to see how they have progressed. I started recently with GNOME 3.14, and am now of 3.18. Overall I'm happy with how they steer the project. There are some nit picks on how the envision GNOME, but that is fine. Not all fingers are equal.

On the note of emails, now that being on GNOME, I wanted to use something native. Thunderbird (though not native) and Evolution were the 2 first choices. Chose Evolution over Thunderbird, as it gave me Maildir support. And I'm impressed that Evolution still is an amazing email client.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 12, 2016 23:33 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

I think you're giving GNOME a free pass because you were using KDE during the earlier major version changes for GNOME. Both the transition from 1 to 2 and the one from 2 to 3 were messy and involved lots of anguish for users. I'm generally happy with GNOME 3- I think many of the drastic changes that were so frustrating during the transition were actually good ideas, and most of the ones that were bad ideas can be plastered over with extensions- but I would never claim that the major version changes have been pleasant.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 6:50 UTC (Wed) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138) [Link] (3 responses)

I would agree with your comments. But if you look on the KDE side, ideas like Akonadi, Nepomuk, Decibel, Solid - The Pillars of KDE; Most of those ideas either faded away, or are overly engineered products. It has been what, like 8 years, since KDE4 was released. And still, overall, it doesn't work as a usable desktop.

I just hope such ugly transitions don't ever happen again. Now the GNU/Linux Desktop Userbase has increased. Both, GNOME and KDE, should realize that transitions don't mean you rip everything apart and go back to the drawing board.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 7:12 UTC (Wed) by MattJD (subscriber, #91390) [Link] (1 responses)

>I would agree with your comments. But if you look on the KDE side, ideas like Akonadi, Nepomuk, Decibel, Solid - The Pillars of KDE; Most of those ideas either faded away, or are overly engineered products. It has been what, like 8 years, since KDE4 was released.

Only one has really faded away, the rest are all going strong. Akonadi is being rewritten, true, but its central idea is still there. Decibel the name has faded away, but telepathy is still making progress in KDE and will provide much of the same idea. Solid hasn't gone anywhere. It is still used for all the API independent hardware parts. Nepomuk is the only dead product. Parts are kept alive in replacements (Baloo), but its main purpose isn't being kept.

I don't think the problem with any of them was over engineering. It's just that they tried to do something new and large. I'm pretty sure if the technology we have today existed when some of those products were being designed, KDE would look much different.

I still enjoy using KDE as my desktop of choice. Yes some release have been painful, but I've only found since KDE 4.0 that they have improved.

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 15:37 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I still enjoy using KDE as my desktop of choice. Yes some release have been painful, but I've only found since KDE 4.0 that they have improved.

Well, every time I've tried Gnome, I've run screaming and kicking BACK to KDE. That said, the transition from KDE3 to KDE4 was so bad it forced me to install and use XFCE and LXDE. I never had any real problem on my "big" machines - Athlon X3 - but on my old machines ("fast" but outdated cpu, stuffed to the gills with all the MEGAbytes of ram that would fit) early KDE4 was unusable. I don't know how long it took to go from power-on to login screen - it never got that far before it was time to shut it down again ...

Cheers,
Wol

Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 18:53 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Both, GNOME and KDE, should realize that transitions don't mean you rip everything apart and go back to the drawing board.

I'm not sure I agree. Making radical changes- including radical improvements- is often disruptive. Even if it's possible to have backward compatibility so people aren't forced to try the new stuff, there's considerable maintenance pain associated with maintaining two ways of doing things. Even worse, a lot of people who are afraid of change will never try the new approach, so the pain of changeover is only delayed until the old way is deprecated and removed.