Yet another failed KDE release?

[Duncan]

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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