Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
Marak most people cannot afford a high end machine today. Me included. The great depression killed my IT career. 20+ years but I had no degree and was competing against people with the same 20+ years of IT experience who had degrees for jobs that wouldn't even pay my child support. Outsourcing and guest workers destroyed the pay scale in IT in the late 90s, early 2000s and it hasn't really rebounded. So I went back to college and switched careers. Currently working on my PHD in psychology. I've been more than a back seat developer. Over the years I've contributed to the code base of several opensource projects and was part of the Fedora docs team for a couple years. I'm out of date with my coding skills, but could jump into some Python based projects today if I didnt' feel KDE was going the absolute wrong direction. My C++ skills have atrophied to the point I wouldn't feel confident coding in C++ any more. Not anything major. I spent 10 years writing code for a living, mostly VB & C++ but some Asm, Pascal/Delphi, Foxpro & other Xbase platforms, even odd stuff like a little COBOL (test app to see if the Asm apps I wrote to talk to PC Cobol from mainframes worked). Even dabbled in some Cold Fusion & PHP back when web programming was new. Converted Blowfish to ASP for one project as the M$ dlls were klunky and insecure. We needed native encryption for the app and Blowfish worked out well. Though about 5 years later they found a serious flaw in Blowfish. Hopefully the end users replaced that module lol. I am not afraid to roll up my sleeves. I've actually volunteered for a couple KDE projects but never heard back. This was years ago when it was KDE 3. As for the validity. It must be nice to have $2k to throw at a computer. Most people do not have that kind of money any more. If they can afford a desktop at all, it's the $400 Walmart special which you consider obsolete. The latest laptop I bought for example has only 4 gigs of RAM. It's not any faster than the 8 year old machine, also with 4 gigs that I am typing this on. A lot of people used PCs only for email, browsing and short messages. Those people went to phones. They already had to have a phone anyway. The phone works for them. The people using PCs today are mostly gamers and people like us. There is however a big niche for low end PCs. People who cannot afford the high end PCs and the M$ insanity and the thousands of dollars of software to get a useful PC using Windoze, only to do it all over again 2 years later. The economy is down world wide and there are millions of users in emerging nations like India and Brazil who could use a cheap, stable, easy to use OS/Desktop that runs on a hand me down or very low end machine. Think about who KDE 5 is targeting? Wealthy and upper middle class older males. That's about it man. The resource demand is too high to run on low machines. Linux scares a lot of users because the Linux community has failed to develop and promote low end machines that do more than what a Chrome book does. KDE is the perfect platform. Unlike Gnome where the keyboard shortcuts, look and feel and interface is dramatically different from app to app. Where the quality of the apps vary dramatically. KDE has a simple interface. The keyboard shortcuts are generally universal. Many KDE apps are best of breed. The worst of them at least do a decent job. It's a massive resource hog. You expressed exactly the sentiment that will kill KDE. The let them eat cake. If they are not rich like me they don't deserve KDE. It's also pointless. Yes PIM IS simple. Seriously, how difficult is it to manage information? I've run million plus record MySQL and Postgress DBs on very low end hardware before. Even made them small office production DB severs and often they also served as the file server and maybe even print server for the office also. Email is simple. Yes I have experience. Not specifically with Kmail but other email formats. I even wrote the world's largest Outlook conversion program at the time. I wrote the code that converted Walmart to Outlook from a defunct email format, that had no documention. Not that Outlook's documentation was all that helpful. I had to use hex editors to reverse engineer both formats, then object browsers to work out the Outlook API. It's NOT that complex. I did all that in 3 months. I'd wager money you got a lot of young programmers who are so OOP fanatic they create methods for 1 line procedures that call other 1 line methods and similar spaghetti code. I've torn into so many of those over the years. Young programmers think it's impressive to do that kind of thing. Annoys the crap out of developers that have to follow later and understand that code and you have to chase down 10 methods to see what is going on in what could have been a 5 line piece of inline code or been a single method/function/property/sub routine if they hadn't gone all Hungarian on the thing. I also see people who've never taken the time
Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
On Thursday October 15 2020 20:49:21 Marek Kochanowicz wrote: >Anyway, I can't understand why one would insist on running KDE on a obsolete >machine An obsolete machine could still have a nice, complete and well-thought out desktop environment, to serve for (simple) document editing, web browsing and other tasks which shouldn't require a competition PC. NB: many brand-name PCs and laptops that are sold in department store are in fact more or less obsolete PCs, because of the components they use. Compare this with the Mac OS. As far as I know the current version should still support my MBP from early 2011 and the trend has always been that newer versions do not slow down older hardware (the same can NOT be said for iOS!). There is no hard reason why this would NOT be possible for KDE. >> KDE 5 works for people with higher end computers, which excludes a huge >> percentage of Linux users. Akondi is the primary culprit. I agree with Marek: akonadi is not the main resource hog. It could really burn some CPU and hog the d-bus under KDE4 but that issue has been addressed. Of course akonadi *is* the main culprit for issues in KMail/Kontact so if that's basically all the only KDE application you use you might get a skewed impression. >> ever runs. I can't use KDE 5 even with Akondi disabled on a machine with 4 >> gigs of RAM. Something is wrong there. Yes, on your end. The aforementioned Chuwi tablet PC has only 4Gb of RAM. Sure the Plasma desktop shell is less responsive than the XFCE desktop but there we are comparing something written largely in QML to something using GTk2 (meaning the core libraries are written in C, not C++). On the whole the PC doesn't suffer worse under KDE than it does under XFCE or Enlightenment. >> The PC is redefining itself right now. KDE can help keep the PC platform >> alive or it can help doom it, relegating people to phones, tablets and >> Android as a primary OS. The desktop needs to evolve and be good at things I think the KDE team sees things the opposite way. People will move to phones & tablets anyway if they no longer have a need for the things they had a desktop or laptop for. They appear to have taken this observation as a justification to focus on development for tablet and phone environments (under Linux or possibly even Android) and to make the traditional desktop look more and more like what everyone (ahem) is used to on phones and tablets, nowadays. >> You want to see KDE grow in users, make it friendly for low end machines. I don't think the ever increasing use of QML is going to help in that department. Nor with >> Make it smooth, pretty and efficient >> people will flock to KDE. No, people flock to distributions that made a name for themselves, which are known not to cause trouble with their hardware and for which you can find the usual 3rd party applications that aren't usually shipped by distributions. If those few select distributions make KDE a well-visible and preferably install-time option (if not the default), people will use it. If not, well, there's always the select few who'll bother installing it and setting it up themselves... I for one did experiment with different DEs when I was considering getting a Linux machine in addition to my Mac. KDE 4.10 or 4.11 seemed a reasonable alternative that was acceptably comparable to OS X so I installed Kubuntu 14.04 (still using an updated descendant of that install!). I'm not happy either with the design choices and directions taken in KDE5 but it's still the only DE I can live with.
Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
First of, i can't understand why you perceive akonadi to be a monster while on my machine plasmashell uses far more memory then all of the akonadi + mysql combined (more then the firefox at the moment actually). Secondly, backseat developers don't get anything done. PIM (contrary to what you said) is not a simple task and the main reason why akonadi exists is because the original KDE PIM codebase became unwieldy. Anyway, I can't understand why one would insist on running KDE on a obsolete machine while there are "lightweight" alternatives like mentioned trinity (btw: KDE 3.5 was considered to be a resource hog back in the day) or XFCE (which is actually a better option then a trinity). They also run on linux. This is end of topic for me. > Marek I disagree. What's the point in all these people working their butts > off for KDE when it's narrowing the potential user base so severely? Why > write software no one can use? Trinity exists b/c there is major > dissatisfaction with the direction of KDE and the performance issues of > Akandi are notorious. Do any search on how to disable Akondi and you'll see > thousands of questions about it due to performance issues going back at > least to KDE 4. > > KDE 5 works for people with higher end computers, which excludes a huge > percentage of Linux users. Akondi is the primary culprit. > > Akondi is set up for people who use a very specific and limited subset of > KDE features. PIM management in specific. I am baffled by how such a simple > task can become such a resource monster. The only other thing it's doing is > indexing files and that is actually not a big resource hog in KDE5. I > didn't even have to turn that off. I DID have to turn Akondi off just to > have a functional machine with KDE5. Though there were other performance > hits and gotchas that were too aggravating. I am typing this on a laptop > with 4 gigs of RAM. I have at least 30 Chrom tabs open Krusader open with a > dozen or so tabs including 3 or 4 SSH tabs to other machines, Gthumb, > Various taggers, converters, wave editors, text editors and long as I don't > open FB it runs great. THAT is what Linux is supposed to do. > > If we want wider adoption of Linux, and the support that comes with a > larger user base we need desktop managers that are friendly and easy to > use. KDE fits that bill except for being such a massive resource hog and > some twerks that exist now in KDE 5 that don't have a solution like the > focus insanity. People try Linux on older machines. If Linux struggles on > that older machine they become disillusioned and stick with windoze. > People try Linux when their machine can no longer run Windoze or people who > get hand me down machines who cannot afford their own PC. If Linux doesn't > work well they give up rather quickly and we lose another potential convert > to Linux. To demand MORE resources than it takes to run Windoze 10 just > buggers the imagination. Which is exactly what KDE 5 is doing. I can run > Windoze 10 on a machine with 4 gigs of RAM. At least as well as windoze > ever runs. I can't use KDE 5 even with Akondi disabled on a machine with 4 > gigs of RAM. Something is wrong there. Especially since the features > offered are so minimal and things most people do on the phone and cloud > nowadays. > > The PC is redefining itself right now. KDE can help keep the PC platform > alive or it can help doom it, relegating people to phones, tablets and > Android as a primary OS. The desktop needs to evolve and be good at things > not easily done on a phone for it to survive. No desktop and Linux goes > away entirely. Android rules the phone market. IOS a 2nd and Linux barely > even a blip. Linux owns the server market but not many servers use KDE. > They are running CentOS or RHEL, and usually headless or running a very > minimal desktop manager. No sane person would put KDE on a production > server. It's way too much of a resource hog. > > So what niche does that leave KDE? What draw is there for KDE to attract > new users? What roles can KDE fill? I'm not seeing any. It's too brutal on > resources for low end machines and servers. KDE doesn't have integration > features like smooth transitions between sound servers that would draw > musicians to KDE. KDE has some great apps, but it's just easier to use > XFCE, Trinity or something like that and add the KDE libs and apps. The > integration between KDE apps seems focused on PIM and nothing else. So what > exactly is all this work on KDE meant to accomplish? Who are they targeting > as users? What market exists long term for KDE as 20 year users like > myself migrate off KDE to other desktop managers and fewer people switch > too KDE? KDE and Gnome used to run neck and neck in surveys. Today neither > is likely to even make the top 3 in desktop user surveys. > > You want to see KDE grow in users, make it friendly for low end machines. > Add graphics & music integration that helps KDE standout
Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
Marek I disagree. What's the point in all these people working their butts off for KDE when it's narrowing the potential user base so severely? Why write software no one can use? Trinity exists b/c there is major dissatisfaction with the direction of KDE and the performance issues of Akandi are notorious. Do any search on how to disable Akondi and you'll see thousands of questions about it due to performance issues going back at least to KDE 4. KDE 5 works for people with higher end computers, which excludes a huge percentage of Linux users. Akondi is the primary culprit. Akondi is set up for people who use a very specific and limited subset of KDE features. PIM management in specific. I am baffled by how such a simple task can become such a resource monster. The only other thing it's doing is indexing files and that is actually not a big resource hog in KDE5. I didn't even have to turn that off. I DID have to turn Akondi off just to have a functional machine with KDE5. Though there were other performance hits and gotchas that were too aggravating. I am typing this on a laptop with 4 gigs of RAM. I have at least 30 Chrom tabs open Krusader open with a dozen or so tabs including 3 or 4 SSH tabs to other machines, Gthumb, Various taggers, converters, wave editors, text editors and long as I don't open FB it runs great. THAT is what Linux is supposed to do. If we want wider adoption of Linux, and the support that comes with a larger user base we need desktop managers that are friendly and easy to use. KDE fits that bill except for being such a massive resource hog and some twerks that exist now in KDE 5 that don't have a solution like the focus insanity. People try Linux on older machines. If Linux struggles on that older machine they become disillusioned and stick with windoze. People try Linux when their machine can no longer run Windoze or people who get hand me down machines who cannot afford their own PC. If Linux doesn't work well they give up rather quickly and we lose another potential convert to Linux. To demand MORE resources than it takes to run Windoze 10 just buggers the imagination. Which is exactly what KDE 5 is doing. I can run Windoze 10 on a machine with 4 gigs of RAM. At least as well as windoze ever runs. I can't use KDE 5 even with Akondi disabled on a machine with 4 gigs of RAM. Something is wrong there. Especially since the features offered are so minimal and things most people do on the phone and cloud nowadays. The PC is redefining itself right now. KDE can help keep the PC platform alive or it can help doom it, relegating people to phones, tablets and Android as a primary OS. The desktop needs to evolve and be good at things not easily done on a phone for it to survive. No desktop and Linux goes away entirely. Android rules the phone market. IOS a 2nd and Linux barely even a blip. Linux owns the server market but not many servers use KDE. They are running CentOS or RHEL, and usually headless or running a very minimal desktop manager. No sane person would put KDE on a production server. It's way too much of a resource hog. So what niche does that leave KDE? What draw is there for KDE to attract new users? What roles can KDE fill? I'm not seeing any. It's too brutal on resources for low end machines and servers. KDE doesn't have integration features like smooth transitions between sound servers that would draw musicians to KDE. KDE has some great apps, but it's just easier to use XFCE, Trinity or something like that and add the KDE libs and apps. The integration between KDE apps seems focused on PIM and nothing else. So what exactly is all this work on KDE meant to accomplish? Who are they targeting as users? What market exists long term for KDE as 20 year users like myself migrate off KDE to other desktop managers and fewer people switch too KDE? KDE and Gnome used to run neck and neck in surveys. Today neither is likely to even make the top 3 in desktop user surveys. You want to see KDE grow in users, make it friendly for low end machines. Add graphics & music integration that helps KDE standout above not only other desktop managers on Linux, but also against the Mac and Windoze. Make it smooth, pretty and efficient and people will flock to KDE. KDE has a lot to offer if you get past the performance hits and the focus issues. Just because something is traditionally a distro responsibility doesn't mean a desktop manager cannot provide something better. I've used KDE for 25 years now. I'd hate to see it die. On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 12:32 AM Marek Kochanowicz wrote: > This discussion is not a constructive one. > > Draciron Smith pisze: > > Akondi is a monster that drove me away from KDE. If you do not have the > > latest greatest machine and multitask, Akondi will bring your machine to > > it's knees, then flog it, then draw and quarter your memory resources, > > grind your hard drive into dust, then chew up the remains. I had to > switch > > to Trinity to get back
Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 05:22:59PM -0500, Draciron Smith wrote: > First on principle. The integrated PIM is mostly obsolete. Phones today > have the CPU horsepower desktops had back when KDE 3 was embarked upon. A > phone is a natural place to do contact management. So it uses just another kind of integrated PIM (as in: integrated with the accounts architecture of Android). There are Account providers, cache backends and viewers. > Getting ISPs to continue support for POP3 & IMAP is like pulling teeth and > when you do get support you gat ONE email address. What do phone e-mail clients use as their backend? Don’t tell me they open the web interface and parse its output. I had my problems with KMail, too, back in 2009 or so. At that time I moved to mutt (which is still my main MUA to this day because it is so damn fast with mass mail handling). But I still use Kontact for PIM stuff and also KMail when I am not in the mood for the terminal. > KDE 4, I disable Akondi, 4 gigs of RAM on this machine. 2 gigs fo RAM on 2 > other machines running KDE 4 with Akondi disabled. Worked great. Ubuntu > 14.04 LTS goes out of support. I have to upgrade to 16.04 and KDE 5 and my > 2 Gig machines barely boot. My 4 Gig machine acts like I'm running WIn 95. Well, I was using KDE 4 and 5 – including PIM – on an Asus Eeepc with an Atom N450, which is an in-order-SMT CPU. It worked back then. Hell, I was using Gentoo on that, too (OK, I admit, I used distcc to do the heavy lifting)! I started it up the other day and did an update (by now running Arch Linux). Firefox took 20 seconds to load a few years ago but was usable after that. It has now reached a point where it has become unusable. Software complexity (sadly) progresses constantly upwards. But even my raspi 3 is now faster than that netbook. I did a comparison by 7z'ing a 100 MB PDF. The netbook did it in 1′40″, the raspi took shy of a minute! -- Grüße | Greetings | Qapla’ What do you call a fly without wings? — A walk. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?
On Thursday October 15 2020 07:32:16 Marek Kochanowicz wrote: >This discussion is not a constructive one. Maybe not for you, but this generic mailing list is as good a place as any (very few "core" devs on here who might feel their toes, anyway). And there are actually a number of valid points in Draciron's prose. To make it a bit more constructive: just how expensive is running the Akonadi server when there are no accounts configured in it, i.e. no AKonadi agents are running? Expensive enough to rethink its auto-starting capabilities, and let it exit when there's no reason for it to keep running? >Draciron Smith pisze: >> First on principle. The integrated PIM is mostly obsolete. Phones today >> have the CPU horsepower desktops had back when KDE 3 was embarked upon. A While the latter may be true, I disagree with the former. It's still perfectly relevant to have something your phone can do too. Phones are nice for quick (as in a few min. at most) actions that require only a few button/key/screen taps. Anything more and the UI is too severely limited in screen estate, input devices and overall ergonomics. I *sometimes* scan through my email from my (refurbished) 1st gen iPhone SE (I won't buy anything substantially larger or more expensive). I will admit readily to being a dinosaur, but for me email is still what it was 30 years ago; a convenient replacement for snail mail. The bulk of my emails are lengthy and some take a long time to complete. >> phone is a natural place to do contact management. Getting ISPs to continue >> support for POP3 & IMAP is like pulling teeth and when you do get support >> you gat ONE email address. ? POP3 maybe (and rightly so), but how do you think phones communicate with email servers? >> might maybe have 1 or 2 people on those lists not using webmail. Those that >> do not are using work accounts usually. It's true that services like hotmail, yahoo and gmail have made many people forget about setting up a MUA - but both MSWin and the Mac OS still have their own email application (the Mac's Mail.app probably still does RSS too) that are a lot less resource intensive than a web browser. Arguing to "just use webmail" is a bit at odds with the idea that older and slower/more limited machines should be useable too. >> match up to what your phone can do in those areas. I do not need 8 gigs of >> RAM on a phone to manage contacts. No system should require that amount of memory only to manage contacts. What you do seem to be forgetting is that phones run special OSes on dedicated hardware with a different kind of multitasking that you wouldn't want to have on a system that can show more than 1 application at the same time. Of course more and more people seem to be NOT doing that any more, judging from the amount of web sites that apparently suppose that everyone uses maximised browser windows... >> churning. I put Trinity on those machines they work great again. Hell even >> Gnome gave me better performance than KDE 5. I'm running 20.04 on one >> machine using Trinity and all good. XFCE also runs rine as a desktop >> manager. KDE has become the rich man's desktop as the poor cannot afford >> the hardware to use KDE anymore. I'm running the Plasma5 desktop from Devuan Beowulf on a Chuwi Hi10 Air tablet. That's a current system with outdated components and to top it off I run Linux from a Samsung Fit USB3 thumb drive. The thing is indeed barely useable under Win10 but it is good enough for casual use under Linux and even allows me to check Facebook (not to be underestimated these days!). It takes a little longer to start up than XFCE (4.12) but once running it's fine. NB: I do have a startup script that terminates Akonadi which I do only because I did configure my accounts for testing purposes. My guess is that running the akonadi server will just make startup slightly longer if you do not configure any accounts in it. It will just get swapped out when it's got nothing to do. I also use xfwm4 as a window manager, but that's not really for resource usage reasons. NB2: if you want a KDE5-based desktop that's a bit more Plasma-like than the rather awkwardly limited LXQt DE there's always the possibility to run the LiquidShell desktop shell instead of Plasma5. That just replaces the panels, desktop window systray, etc. and I'm pretty certain it doesn't cause Akonadi to be started. Using a different window manager than KWin is also a good idea if you're on a more limited system. R.
