Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday October 15 2020 07:32:16 Marek Kochanowicz wrote:
>This discussion is not a constructive one.

Maybe not for you, but this generic mailing list is as good a place as any (very few "core" devs on here who might feel their toes, anyway).
And there are actually a number of valid points in Draciron's prose.

To make it a bit more constructive: just how expensive is running the Akonadi server when there are no accounts configured in it, i.e. no AKonadi agents are running? Expensive enough to rethink its auto-starting capabilities, and let it exit when there's no reason for it to keep running?

>Draciron Smith pisze:
>> First on principle. The integrated PIM is mostly obsolete. Phones today
>> have the CPU horsepower desktops had back when KDE 3 was embarked upon. A

While the latter may be true, I disagree with the former. It's still perfectly relevant to have something your phone can do too. Phones are nice for quick (as in a few min. at most) actions that require only a few button/key/screen taps. Anything more and the UI is too severely limited in screen estate, input devices and overall ergonomics. I *sometimes* scan through my email from my (refurbished) 1st gen iPhone SE (I won't buy anything substantially larger or more expensive). I will admit readily to being a dinosaur, but for me email is still what it was 30 years ago; a convenient replacement for snail mail. The bulk of my emails are lengthy and some take a long time to complete.

>> phone is a natural place to do contact management. Getting ISPs to continue
>> support for POP3 & IMAP is like pulling teeth and when you do get support
>> you gat ONE email address.

? POP3 maybe (and rightly so), but how do you think phones communicate with email servers?

>> might maybe have 1 or 2 people on those lists not using webmail. Those that
>> do not are using work accounts usually.

It's true that services like hotmail, yahoo and gmail have made many people forget about setting up a MUA - but both MSWin and the Mac OS still have their own email application (the Mac's Mail.app probably still does RSS too) that are a lot less resource intensive than a web browser.

Arguing to "just use webmail" is a bit at odds with the idea that older and slower/more limited machines should be useable too. 

>> match up to what your phone can do in those areas. I do not need 8 gigs of
>> RAM on a phone to manage contacts.

No system should require that amount of memory only to manage contacts. What you do seem to be forgetting is that phones run special OSes on dedicated hardware with a different kind of multitasking that you wouldn't want to have on a system that can show more than 1 application at the same time. Of course more and more people seem to be NOT doing that any more, judging from the amount of web sites that apparently suppose that everyone uses maximised browser windows...


>> churning. I put Trinity on those machines they work great again. Hell even
>> Gnome gave me better performance than KDE 5. I'm running 20.04 on one
>> machine using Trinity and all good. XFCE also runs rine as a desktop
>> manager. KDE has become the rich man's desktop as the poor cannot afford
>> the hardware to use KDE anymore. 

I'm running the Plasma5 desktop from Devuan Beowulf on a Chuwi Hi10 Air tablet. That's a current system with outdated components and to top it off I run Linux from a Samsung Fit USB3 thumb drive. The thing is indeed barely useable under Win10 but it is good enough for casual use under Linux and even allows me to check Facebook (not to be underestimated these days!). It takes a little longer to start up than XFCE (4.12) but once running it's fine.
NB: I do have a startup script that terminates Akonadi which I do only because I did configure my accounts for testing purposes. My guess is that running the akonadi server will just make startup slightly longer if you do not configure any accounts in it. It will just get swapped out when it's got nothing to do. I also use xfwm4 as a window manager, but that's not really for resource usage reasons.

NB2: if you want a KDE5-based desktop that's a bit more Plasma-like than the rather awkwardly limited LXQt DE there's always the possibility to run the LiquidShell desktop shell instead of Plasma5. That just replaces the panels, desktop window systray, etc. and I'm pretty certain it doesn't cause Akonadi to be started.
Using a different window manager than KWin is also a good idea if you're on a more limited system.

R.