KDE technology haters should stop reading here 
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This is a rant about my issues with KDE (probably many other users out there have bumped into these like me) that made my rage literally explode this weekend. Let’s start with the annoying fact that made me write this rant.
KMail 2 and its akonadi backend
Don’t get me wrong. I love akonadi, it’s a beautiful piece of technology and very important in KDE. When KMail swithced from its old backend to akonadi it was unusable. I had all my accounts (3, if you are curious) set up for imap and, well, i had a *LOT* of crashes. I couldn’t go on like this and moved to thunderbird even if it’s a punch in the eye concerning looks in KDE. I promised myself that i would retry KMail 2 when it would be more stable.
Some weeks ago, my laptop’s installation ‘sploded and i was too lazy to fix it (aka had too much crap on it even to bother) and i decided to give gentoo a spin. So here i am with a fresh kde 4.8 install and here i go:
emerge kde-base/kdepim-meta
All ok, i set up my 3 accounts (2 pop and gmail as imap). Love it. The integation is awesome, background email check is awesome, my life is awesome. I put also some filters for the mailing lists i follow lurk. 1 week ago i mysteriously start loosing emails from my first pop account (the second one is less active and i didn’t notice). So i presume it’s KMail and send me a mail from gmail. Mail arrives in couple of seconds. I decided it’s some ISP fail and live with it for a couple of days. Then, this saturday i decided to emerge thunderbird to test an extension i’ve seen. For the curious ones:
?[admiral0@deimos] [/dev/pts/2] ?[~]> genlop -i thunderbird * mail-client/thunderbird Total builds: 1 Global build time: 50 minutes and 5 seconds. Info about currently installed ebuild: * mail-client/thunderbird-11.0.1 Install date: Sat Apr 14 14:13:03 2012 USE=" -bindist -gconf -+crashreporter -+crypt -+ipc -+lightning -+minimal -mozdom -+webm" CFLAGS="-pipe -march=native -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wno-return-type -w -mno-avx"
All mails arrive to me safely! So here it goes:
My face when trying thunderbird
Alternatives Integration
So you’d expect that now i’m all warm and squishy inside because i’ve got my system working all right. Wrong!
Mozilla team did an awesome job with firefox 11 and thunderbird 11 on linux. Finally they use freedesktop.org specification for notifications and prevent me from killing myself when a download finishes or mail arrives. Yay for mozilla team! What about kde’s side?
KDE has an awesome framework for desktop search and data sharing between applications. Akonadi can store/retrieve/make available bookmarks, mails(but it fails), calendars, todos and so on. So i would expect a resource to get firefox’s bookmarks, and another ones pulling data from thunderbird. Are there any like these?
Other annoyances
There are some things in the day-to-day life that could be made better but no one cares enough. It seems that performance/reactivity issues in KDE are addressed when they bite back. Like nepomuk. Nepomuk was never active for me until Sebastian Trueg started hacking and profiling. Now nepomuk is active on all of my installs. There are many places where profiling is needed. Some examples:
- kickoff – Clicking on the button presses it (i mean graphically) and it freezes plasma till menu is loaded. Pretty annoying.
- kde startup – i presume it’s a lazy startup, because when the loading screen goes away, 5-10 secs pass before i can do anything useful.
- kwin – when using another wm *everything* feels faster.
So i ask myself, where is the usability team that was so active in the 4.0 era? Most usability fixes are done by software’s own developers, and that’s why “looks fine to me” is the actual motivation for keeping/modifying UX. Result?
- when applications open first time, user is like “wth is this?!” because window is too little for the contents and some labels don’t even have space to display.
- till current git nm plasmoid had hardcoded text color in labels (so half of the labels had black text in dark color scheme)
- use obsidian coast/zion colorscheme and open kmail.
- no “clean” plasma themes besides ambience and aya. (both not shipped by default afaik)
What will i do?
I can do very little other than complaining. I know only some parts of powerdevil and akonadi API, so:
I’ll continue work (i’ve left behind) on vgaswitcheroo action for powerdevil and try to do a firefox bookmark resource for akonadi (i’ve had some fails with QSQLITE and need a way to debug that)
