Lost behavior between KDE 4.1.3.1 and 5.5.5

[Duncan]

Draciron Smith posted on Wed, 20 Jun 2018 05:26:56 -0500 as excerpted:

> That's not a big issue for me since I only use Kmail to open mail
> archives and cannot use it in KDE 5 anyway as it brings up Akondi and
> Akondi buries my system. I'll download the strait Ubuntu rather than
> Kbuntu and see if Trinity is supported on that and give it a try. I use
> Chrome primarily, Firefox for some stuff. Occasionally Opera. Not a big
> fan of Konquerer.

FWIW I tend toward the leading edge here, as opposed to the trailing 
being primarily discussed here, which means I had to deal with these 
problems some years ago now and they're pretty much history for me at 
this point, but here's how things turned out for me.

For mail I had been on kmail nearly a decade when the kdepim team jumped 
the shark with akonadi and forced it for kmail.  Now mail /should/ be a 
solved problem these days, it's /not/ new rocket science after all, and 
kmail had clearly worked well for me for nearing a decade, no database 
necessary for fast and stable access (then or on the mail app I switched 
to and use now) but it quickly became clear that wasn't the way the kdepim 
team saw it.  For them it was a toy to play with and unnecessarily 
complexify with a less stable binary-form database, regardless of the 
stability implications for its (formerly) loyal users.

I see you mention switching to webmail below, but I don't particularly 
like that idea for a number of reasons including security, mail archive 
access and portability, and potentially privacy.

I evaluated my mail options and ended up switching to (the gtk-based) 
claws-mail, which I remain extremely happy with now several years later.  
Switching and converting my archives to claws-native mh-format (which 
sort of like maildir uses a file per message) was a bit of a pain, but it 
was well (VERY well!!) worth it, and perhaps the best part, given their 
developer- *and* userbase's emphasis on scriptable access to text-based 
formats, they're extremely unlikely to do what the kdepim team did with 
kmail and entirely unnecessarily destabilize, complexify and memory-
hoggify it with some sort of binary-database format... and if they do, 
there's enough other mh-format-compatible clients, including the sylpheed 
that claws was originally the testing branch for and the command-line 
based mutt, that users shouldn't be stuck without a viable alternative.

Meanwhile, the worst mail store damage I've seen after a crash is 
inaccurate unread-mail counts on recently active folders, and that syncs 
as soon as you enter the folder or (further) new mail is fetched to it.

The only other kdepim-based app I used in the kde3 and pre-akonadi kde4 
era was akregator, but as it happens, claws-mail has a very good feed-
client extension as well, and that's what I ended up switching to, tho I 
prefer keeping feeds and mail separate, so I run a second claws instance 
(needs pointed at a different data and tmpdir to keep the instances 
separate), with a different icon theme to tell them apart on sight, for 
feeds.

As that got me off of kde for mail and feeds, and I was already off of it 
for news (the gtk-based pan, which has always been better for me than 
knode, in part due to better binary handling), web (had already switched 
to firefox in the early kde4 era when it became clear konqueror wasn't 
getting security-support appropriate to a primary-use browser, and later 
to chromium), media player (dropped kaffeine for the qt-based smplayer 
and vlc in the early kde4 fiasco, dropped amarok in the early kde4 fiasco 
as well, for mpd and various tiny front-ends that together still were far 
smaller and less dependency heavy than amarok), and hotkey daemon 
(dropped khotkeys in the kde4 fiasco when it couldn't handle serial-multi-
key triggers as kde3's khotkeys did, for a hybrid setup composed of 
various scripts, xdotool, sxhkd, etc, with wayland I'll have to modify it 
somewhat and trigger it with khotkeys again, but the base setup will 
still work)... I found I was using *much* lighter kde than I was back in 
the kde3 era, and ironically given that at one point I had contemplated 
trying to switch off of gtk for the few apps I had using it, I was and 
remain far closer to being able to ditch qt/kde and switch everything to 
gtk!

But there was a nice upside for kde as well, since now that I wasn't 
using it for much more than the desktop and a few games and my kde 
installation was far lighter, I could, and did and still do (with a 
period during the frameworks5 upgrade when I didn't) actually switch to 
running live-git kde/frameworks/plasma/apps, built from the gentoo/kde 
overlay and updated typically a time or two a week.

So these days kde (and the gentoo/kde folks too) gets far better bug 
reports from me, often bisected to the specific git commit that triggered 
the problem, so they can fix it before release.  Tho it's limited to the 
relatively small subset of kde-plasma and apps, together with the 
frameworks they pull in, that I actually run.

> I remember a conversation not long after KDE4 came out about QT
> dependencies and KDE. I would think that Trinity would stick with the
> latest QT just for support issues. The primary KDE apps I'm hooked on
> are things like Krusader, SoundKonverter, Ksnapshot, K3B, Krename,
> things like that. Most stuff I use desktop independent like Synaptic,
> Chrome, etc or mix in Gnome apps like Gimp, Gphoto, etc. Kmail is my
> favorite mail platform but I I switched to web mail a long time ago.

I won't/can't use chrome/opera and the like because they're not 
freedomware and I don't and can't agree to the servantware licenses that 
are arguably a condition for running them legally (and even if not, I'd 
not /want/ to run servantware from someone who doesn't consider it a 
right of the user to view/change/share-as-changed-or-not the sources 
/and/ the binary, preferably with a copyleft provision that ensures the 
same rights get passed on in turn to those the source and/or binaries are 
shared with).

But as to the desktop independent stuff, as should be obvious from the 
above, I'm definitely with you!

-- 
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