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

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Friday October 16 2020 13:02:32 Bug Reporter wrote:

>by users for its great quality and features. I think it is even fair to say
>KDE is considered the premier DE for Linux now. Even if that opinion is not
>as widely held as it seems,

Which premier distributions ship KDE as their default DE, or at least an install-time option, and what is their "market" share? I suppose the answer could be found on Distrowatch but it doesn't actually interest me enough to dig it up.

>the air of success around the project is strong

What does that even mean? There are a number of very good application built on the KF5 frameworks: KDevelop, digiKam, KDenlive, Krita, RKWard and Kile come to mind but there are probably also some in the KF5 Applications collection. The Plasma5 desktop has underwhelmed me until now; it completely failed on the migration from Plasma4 for my 2 accounts (to the extent I could barely rebuild 1 session by hand and moved the other to Cinnamon). KWin has become a juggernaut that can no longer be used without compositing (no window shadows!) and is prone to obnoxious graphics artefacts with compositing enabled (that may be due to my integrated intel GPU using the i915 driver but xfwm4 glitches much less).
I more or less dread the day I need to move to Linux full time and have to discover that multihead support is indeed as flaky as I've heard it is.

>and this is an indication that the project is going in the right direction,
>as well as an indication of the quality of the work produced.

I cannot really agree with that. I've been involved with KF5 framework development (and adaptation for Mac) until not that long ago, and I've seen too many relatively simple bugs remaining unfixed (and questions on the devel ML remain unanswered), apparently because the focus has shifted to phone/tablet integration and making desktop apps look like mobile apps. That means pulling the UX down to a lower level, IMHO dangerously close to the Gnome UX. As to quality: look at your .xsession,errors or whatever the name of the logfile where all terminal output from the DE and its children goes. Mine (on Devuan Beowulf, so not the latest KDE) is full with warnings and other debug info, including lots of QML-related warnings and even errors. That's not exactly a sign of quality software , in my book.

Of course, if you like a modern Metro-style flat UI with oversized and overspaced elements, with a mix of gaudy and pastel colours plus a subset of the icons in B&W that remind of those in Apple System 4 and 5 days, then KDE5 will feel like home and you probably can't imagine being happier. Sadly for me I'm not in that category, and it annoys me enormously that part of the QML-based UI doesn't seem to use Freetype for font rendering and so looks awful next to what Freetype + FontConfig produce when installed with the Infinality Ultimate patches and font tweak files.

R