Points of Interest

I’ve been a KDE user for a very long time – actually since I use Linux on my machines. I remember the day when I wiped Win 95 and installed SuSE Linux (do not recall the version) back in 1998. I sat in front of the computer, staring at the KDE filemanager. And I thought: »And that’s the operating system better than Win?!?«. Meanwhile I know better, and KDE matured over the years. I helped with a bunch of applications, writing manuals, filing bug reports, and finally started to write my own code to get some tools I missed.

KDE 3.5 was a very usable and stable system, while KMail still is an excellent mail user agent.

However, the switch to KDE 4 was a major break, introducing lots of rewritten code and new design concepts. While I appreciated all the ongoing changes, I left my system untouched, still running KDE 3.5.

I upgraded as my distro was outdated and the repositories went offline. This way I got KDE 4.3. Well, it was running and ready to use, but there were lots of issues which did remind me of the days when struggling with Win 95.

One source of eternal joy is the mess around KDE PIM, Akonadi, Strigi, Nepomuk, Virtuoso-t and the like.

Kontact, the PIM application embedding mail, contacts, feeds and the like, started to rely on Akonadi, which in turn requires an SQL database server for operation. Unfortunately it didn’t work out of the box, and after following some docs on the net and trying out several meds to cure the problem, I finally gave up and decided that I will never run an SQL server just to manage some personal data. So I have to close the annoying Akonadi error message dialog each time I log in.

I understand the design concepts behind the PIM suite and am impressed of what the KDE community tries to achieve. But at first I need a working system where I can perform basic tasks. Further, I want to create backups just by copying the data of my home directory to another hard drive. I will not start to write specialized scripts which will backup and restore some additional data of a database server. If I wanted to, I’d install an Exchange server and enjoy the journey.

One of the cool things I always liked in KDE was the fish-protocol which allows you to edit files transparently directly on a server over an ssh connection. Unfortunately this was one of the features broken in KDE 4.3.

Meanwhile I upgraded my distro and got KDE 4.4. The fish protocol is operational again (which is great). But the problems with Akonadi remained. I still cannot access my contacts from within Kontact, as it complains about problems with the Akonadi server.

Additionally, it seems that there still is absolutely no possibility to sync any of the PIM data with my cell phone.

The file indexer continues to keep my CPU and notebook fans busy (hi nepomukservicestub). I saw it eating one of my cores completely, but also saw it at 70% CPU usage.

Dolphin, the file manager, also shows some severe bugs. Today I wanted to change the file permissions of an (admittedly huge) backup file available on an external USB hard drive. I rightclicked and chose to open the properties dialog. The result was a frozen file manager which I killed manually. After two further attempts I used the command line to set the file’s properties. In case you expect that all this fan blowing at least makes sense because you’ll easily find files afterwards, you might be wrong.

To me KDE 4 appears as an overloaded desktop environment with too many applications, too many features and too many bugs, which in turn has problems performing basic tasks like managing files, PIM data and doing some sync to a cell phone. I really appreciate the decision to turn the computer into a social desktop to manage one’s internet activity. But I wonder whether it was better to keep the rewrite of the desktop separate of the breaks and changes of the PIM applications. The propellerheads behind KDE were brave and decided that they better do it the hard way. KDE probably will be a cool desktop in a couple of years again.

But meanwhile I need a replacement, and less surprisingly I’m considering to give another desktop a try. Besides Gnome and Evolution, there are other window managers and PIM applications. If you’re a KDE switcher and want to share some experience, please drop me a line.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 23:33 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.