Renaud (Ron) Olgiati posted on Tue, 07 May 2013 19:56:32 -0400 as
excerpted:
> On Tuesday 07 May 2013 19:21 my mailbox was graced by a message from
> Duncan who wrote:
>> Other distros who stuck with pre-akonadi kmail-1/kdepim-4.4 for awhile
>> either have or will eventually need to make similar decisions...
>
> Another possibility: users will go over to Claws-mail (or other MUA),
> and drop KDE completely, some with a sigh of relief...
There's some irony there. I too am a claws-mail user there, having
migrated to it with kde 4.7 after asking myself one day after yet another
kmail/akonadi crash with loss of message (that I could probably recover,
but that was the point, why did I NEED to do this, REPEATEDLY?!). The
irony is that back in late 2001/early 2002 when I migrated from MS and
MSOE to Linux and kmail, it had come down to either kmail or the then
sylpheed-claws for mail, and I chose kmail. Had I made the other choice
at that point, I'd have not had the whole hassle of switching back to it
when kmail akonadified/jumped-the-shark.
The second irony is that back in the late kde3 era, along about 3.5.8 or
so, I had only a couple gtk-based apps and was investigating trying to
drop them and thus be able to drop gtk from my (gentoo, so I build all
updates, making unnecessary "extra" packages a lot more expensive a
choice than on a binary distro) system entirely. Over the live of kde4,
I dropped first one kde app and then another for gtk-based alternatives,
until today all my big apps are gtk-based, with pretty much the kde/
plasma desktop itself, kwin, kdegames, and dolphin and gwenview, being
the only kde stuff I have left. If I add qt, that adds vlc and
smplayer2. That's it.
On the gtk side I've always run pan as my news client (that was one of
the gtk apps I was trying to dump, which was difficult as I'm involved
with pan upstream as well, probably the biggest reason I did NOT dump all
gtk), gtk-based firefox has replaced kde-based konqueror, and claws-mail
has replaced both kmail and akregator. That's all my "big" apps.
It be a lot less trouble now to dump kde and even qt entirely, than to
dump gtk. There's gtk alternatives for vlc and smplayer2 or I could just
keep qt, I already have gimv/gimageviewer installed which could replace
gwenview, and the only kde games I use much are palapeli (puzzles) and
kpat. There's certainly patience alternatives and I could drop palapeli,
which leaves only dolphin and the plasma desktop itself, plus kwin.
Razor-qt could replace plasma or I could research a gtk replacement, and
I've liked what I read about enlightenment recently as well, so I'd
surely look at that. I already use the mc/midnight-commander semi-gui
for most file management, so dolphin's usage is mainly as the most
convenient gui-file-manager association, making its replacement trivial.
That leaves only kwin, but with some research (including looking at
enlightenment as I mentioned above), that could be replaced as well.
So both in mail client and in gtk vs kde/qt, I've come full circle since
kde4, and am now closer to killing kde/qt than gtk.
But on the other side, using so little kde has made it dramatically
easier for me to run first the kde-prerelease betas and rcs, and now the
live-branch git-kde (gentoo calls this version 4.x.49.9999, with x being
10 ATM, thus 4.10.49.9999, full trunk being simply denoted as version
9999). I'm rebuilding the limited kde I still run from sources every few
days, taking under an hour to do so (20 minutes for a hot-cache rebuild)
thanks to ccache and parallel-builds done in tmpfs (6-core AMD bulldozer
fx6100 CPU, 16 gig RAM). Thus I got the updates that went into 4.10.3
shortly after they hit git, instead of waiting for the 4.10.3 release.
It'd be a lot harder to do that if I was running nearly all kde based X-
apps, as I was back in the kde3 era, both because there'd be a lot more
to build in that case, and because I'd be risking the stability of more
of my "production-critical" apps in the process.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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