The KDEPIM / Akonadi situation

[Martin Steigerwald]

Nate Graham - 12.06.20, 05:11:31 CEST:
> software. I'm currently using Thunderbird as my email client and it is
> boringly reliable. Everything works 100%, 100% of the time. There is
> no drama whatsoever, and no maintenance required. That's the goal

Seriously +1 on that.

This exactly matches my experience with Evolution and Evolution EWS for 
accessing work mail (stored on Office 365). I switched to Evolution there 
cause with Akonadi EWS sending mails often failed.

No crash, no maintenance, no drama, no nothing. This thing *just works*.

And I'd say the scope of Evolution has similar complexity than the scope 
of KDEPIM. At least the feature sets are somewhat similar. I bet KDEPIM 
and Akonadi may be a bit more flexible and have a feature more here and 
there, but IMAP, POP3, locally stored mail, EWS, calender, address book, 
GPG support and a lot of other features are all there.

And again: This is no offense meant. I am grateful for all the work 
KDEPIM developers did. All the free time they volunteered! I expressed 
that gratitude several times and I am happy to express it again. I 
helped with bug triage, user support, I defended Akonadi, tried to help 
to bring people together. With considerable help of KDE developers I 
helped to fix a serious past performance issue with maildir resource 
(needless sorting of filenames during folder sync)…

However being grateful does not somehow disallow to raise an issue that 
exists since a long time. The issue, that Akonadi based KDEPIM fails to 
provide the reliability and speed that users expect to experience when 
they use a PIM application suite.

"akonadictl fsck", "item without RID", database administration, 
duplicated mail, stuck Akonadi resources, waiting for one or several 
minutes before being able to reply to a mail in KMail and things like 
that – no user should ever have to deal with *any of that* just so use 
PIM applications, no matter how good they otherwise are.

Being grateful does not somehow exclude raising the issue that all of 
this is still there with KDEPIM and Akonadi 20.04. And that all of this 
has been here for years.

Quite the contrary. I think it is a disservice to the KDEPIM project to 
pretend that this is not there. At least I can imagine that developers 
like to have happy users.

I see people invested a lot of time. And I am truly grateful for that.

It is just that the investment of time did somehow not lead to a result 
where the stability, reliability and speed of KDEPIM matches that of 
Evolution or Thunderbird. And by stating that I do not mean to diminish 
the progress KDEPIM developers achieved in any way.

I do think it is important to see this. And accept it. And then it can 
be possible to move beyond… Not seeing it seems to keep KDEPIM stuck 
where it currently is, *despite* all the effort.

Best,
-- 
Martin