Akonadi – still alive and rocking

Posted Jan 13, 2016 6:50 UTC (Wed) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138)
In reply to: Akonadi – still alive and rocking by rgmoore
Parent article: Akonadi – still alive and rocking

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.