[kde-linux] KDEwallet?

[Duncan]

David Baron posted on Mon, 08 Feb 2016 10:14:37 +0200 as excerpted:

> Running on a Debian Sid Box. The wallet is not doing anything. How does
> one get it going, or when will it be operational?

By "not doing anything", do you mean it's not working when you know it 
should be (that is, you've tried to store passwords in it and it won't 
store them or doesn't trigger to store them when earlier kde, presumably 
kde4, did), or do you mean it simply appears to be doing nothing and 
useless, and you want to know what it's /supposed/ to be used for?

I think Kevin's answer assumed the former, while I read your question as 
the latter, and will answer it as such.  Skip to the last paragraph if 
you want the short version...

FWIW, kwallet is currently doing nothing for me, either, and while it's 
currently still installed for kde-frameworks5 as the dependencies are a 
bit different (and less refined at this stage in kde-apps/frameworks/
plasma5, at least on gentoo) than they were in late kde4, IIRC it wasn't 
even installed for me in late kde4, after I switched to non-kde providers 
for everything I had been using kde and kwallet for in kde3 and early 
kde4.  At some point I expect the (gentoo) dependencies to be refined 
somewhat further, and I probably won't need it then on frameworks5 and 
friends either.

In particular, when kmail jumped the akonadi shark, I tried out the 
akonadized version, and after it ate one too many emails, I switched to 
(the gtk-based) claws-mail.

So I was no longer using kwallet to store my email passwords as I was no 
longer using kmail.

Similarly, along about kde 4.6, it became very apparent that even many of 
konqueror's and other kde devs considered konqueror little more than a 
toy, while I needed a web browser that could reliably and _securely_ 
handle online banking and other online money transactions, among other 
things, and additionally, there was simply no way for konqueror to 
compete with firefox's thriving extensions ecosystem, which I was growing 
to depend on at the time and which I DEFINITELY depend on now.

So I was no longer using kwallet to store my web account details as I was 
no longer using konqueror.

And I was already using the (gtk-based) pan in place of knode for news, 
as knode simply didn't have the features I wanted/needed in a news client 
back when I originally switched from MS, so I have no idea if knode used 
kwallet for password storage or not, and I'm not into instant messaging 
and the like, so no idea what the kde IM clients do there either.

Which left kwallet (as well as akonadi and friends, which were quickly 
uninstalled) unused.  As I said, I /think/ I actually had kwallet 
uninstalled by late kde4, tho I'm not absolutely sure on that.  What I 
/do/ know is that on plasma5 and friends, while I'm sure it's unused as 
I've not had anything kde related (well, other than the lockscreen, which 
uses the standard system user account password and mechanisms) popup any 
password dialogs, there's several packages still pulling kwallet5 in.  
Hopefully they'll eventually make that dependency optional, and I can get 
kwallet off my system once again.

The short version is, kwallet is only used if you're using a kde-based 
app, kmail, konqueror, etc, that uses it to store login credentials for 
various generally online accounts other than your system-level user 
account, which is still managed using normal *ix style user 
authentication mechanisms, not kwallet.  If you're not using any of 
those, or if for instance you use konqueror but don't have any site 
logins stored on it, then kwallet is pretty well useless, since that's 
what it does, store credentials for such mostly online accounts.  If you 
start using a kde-based app that in turn uses kwallet to store such 
account credentials, you should start using kwallet automatically.

-- 
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