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

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Thursday October 15 2020 20:49:21 Marek Kochanowicz wrote:

>Anyway, I can't understand why one would insist on running KDE on a obsolete 
>machine

An obsolete machine could still have a nice, complete and well-thought out desktop environment, to serve for (simple) document editing, web browsing and other tasks which shouldn't require a competition PC. NB: many brand-name PCs and laptops that are sold in department store are in fact more or less obsolete PCs, because of the components they use.

Compare this with the Mac OS. As far as I know the current version should still support my MBP from early 2011 and the trend has always been that newer versions do not slow down older hardware (the same can NOT be said for iOS!).
There is no hard reason why this would NOT be possible for KDE.

>> KDE 5 works for people with higher end computers, which excludes a huge
>> percentage of Linux users. Akondi is the primary culprit.

I agree with Marek: akonadi is not the main resource hog. It could really burn some CPU and hog the d-bus under KDE4 but that issue has been addressed. Of course akonadi *is* the main culprit for issues in KMail/Kontact so if that's basically all the only KDE application you use you might get a skewed impression.

>> ever runs. I can't use KDE 5 even with Akondi disabled on a machine with 4
>> gigs of RAM.  Something is wrong there.

Yes, on your end. The aforementioned Chuwi tablet PC has only 4Gb of RAM. Sure the Plasma desktop shell is less responsive than the XFCE desktop but there we are comparing something written largely in QML to something using GTk2 (meaning the core libraries are written in C, not C++). On the whole the PC doesn't suffer worse under KDE than it does under XFCE or Enlightenment.

>> The PC is redefining itself right now. KDE can help keep the PC platform
>> alive or it can help doom it, relegating people to phones, tablets and
>> Android as a primary OS.  The desktop needs to evolve and be good at things

I think the KDE team sees things the opposite way. People will move to phones & tablets anyway if they no longer have a need for the things they had a desktop or laptop for. They appear to have taken this observation as a justification to focus on development for tablet and phone environments (under Linux or possibly even Android) and to make the traditional desktop look more and more like what everyone (ahem) is used to on phones and tablets, nowadays.

>> You want to see KDE grow in users, make it friendly for low end machines.

I don't think the ever increasing use of QML is going to help in that department. Nor with

>> Make it smooth, pretty and efficient

>> people will flock to KDE.

No, people flock to distributions that made a name for themselves, which are known not to cause trouble with their hardware and for which you can find the usual 3rd party applications that aren't usually shipped by distributions. If those few select distributions make KDE a well-visible and preferably install-time option (if not the default), people will use it. If not, well, there's always the select few who'll bother installing it and setting it up themselves...

I for one did experiment with different DEs when I was considering getting a Linux machine in addition to my Mac. KDE 4.10 or 4.11 seemed a reasonable alternative that was acceptably comparable to OS X so I installed Kubuntu 14.04 (still using an updated descendant of that install!). I'm not happy either with the design choices and directions taken in KDE5 but it's still the only DE I can live with.