Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?

[Georg C. F. Greve]

On Saturday 17 November 2012 10.44:04 Anne Wilson wrote:
> I think the problem is that you are wrong about this.  I think Akonadi
> has been so deeply coded in that it was not possible to have it
> deactivated and the applications still run.

I think this is confusing Akonadi and Nepomuk, actually, which is a common 
mistake because the two were pitched together.

Think of Akonadi as the email client protocol stack.

Of course you can disable that, but then the applications that rely on it 
don't have the email protocols available. A "if you turn off the light, it is 
dark" scenario: "If you uninstall Firefox, you no longer have Firefox."

Nepomuk on the other hand is what provides the semantic desktop and also has 
been used by Akonadi for some searches (e.g. address book) and thus when 
Nepomuk breaks, it looks like Akonadi is broken. Another reason for the 
misunderstanding, FWIW, since the functionality of Nepomuk is exposed through 
Akonadi for the user in this case.

In any case: You can disable Nepomuk in the KDE settings (look into "Desktop 
Search") and separately tell it to index files or email. 

Is that a sane default setting? Probably not, because people who do not want 
such features are typically savvy enough to turn them off, while the opposite 
is usually not true.

And then there isn't just "two kinds of people". There is billions.

I know people who consider KDE in toto a waste of resource, because all they 
ever do is fire up emacs. Some people also don't use email clients, but copy 
their mbox file through ssh. And I am old enough to know people who considered 
compilers a waste of space and totally unnecessary because they wrote machine 
code as hex numbers directly.

So if you don't like it, don't use it.

Personally I have also suffered from Nepomuk, in particular, and only recently 
started having "wow, this is actually useful" experiences.

Which is why I understand people questioning its usefulness.

Best regards,
Georg


-- 
Georg C. F. Greve <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Member of the General Assembly
http://fsfe.org/about/greve/
http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/
http://identi.ca/greve
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