16.04 w/o KDE PIM?

[David Fletcher]

On Fri, 2016-03-04 at 08:33 -0300, Marcelo Magno T. Sales wrote:
> To tell the truth, KDEPIM is broken since the first 4.x version. It
> used to work so well in KDE 3.5.x, but after the "akonadified" KDEPIM
> 4, nothing is reliable as it used to be anymore.
> I've been fighting all this time to find a way through all the many
> bugs, crashes and freezes of KMail because I've been unable to find
> another mail client that can be configured to do all the things KMail
> does (or did) and I was always hopeful that things would get better
> with time, but I'm really tired of all this and in the last few months
> I've been seriously considering to switch to another mail client. I
> found no other client that is so resourceful as KMail once was, but it
> is more important to me that it is reliable and fast. KMail really
> hasn't been either for a long time and I should have abandoned it long
> ago.
> If Kubuntu does not ship KDEPIM anymore, it will be just the little
> push I needed to make the change, and I will wecome that. I think KDE
> as a whole will behave better without KDEPIM.

Some years ago I was an enthusiast of KDE. Then it was decided, if I
remember correctly, to write a completely new version, which for me was
completely unsatisfactory as it simply didn't work properly for me. I
decided to dump all of my messages out of kmail and into a maildir on a
mini server that I'd decided to build.

I shifted to Ubuntu with gnome which with whatever mail client it came
with, I was perfectly happy with. Then it was decided to rewrite gnome.
What a mess it all turned into, that simply didn't work properly for me.

So, off to Linux Mint. I'm using Evolution with the same maildir I set
up years ago. At first, Evolution obviously had bugs which would cause
it to crash when doing certain things with it. Obviously it has been
worked on and for me it now works pretty much perfectly. A very pleasant
surprise for me was that when I bought a Moto G to replace my rather old
Nokia 6230i, it was a piece of cake to export all my contacts from
Evolution to a vcard file, which imported with no problem at all into my
Moto G.

If you're writing PIM/email software, it's a solemn responsibility that
you're taking on because it's other people's Personal Information that
you're Managing. For this reason I always prefer reliable software over
smartass software.

I don't know whether or not Evolution is any faster or more functional
than whatever KDE now provides, but for me it's reliable.

Dave