[dundee] Those pesky KDE devs...just a moan

[Robert Ladyman]

WARNING: Winter-blonde rant ahead, no need to read it.

Grrr...those jolly KDE developers....they're at it again, upsetting us old 
boys and ignoring their users. Interestingly enough, one of the criticisms is 
their lack of a Benevolent Dictator For Life, to stomp on things....

Just updated one of my desktop machines to discover that Akonadi (a sort of 
central store for contact information) is installed by default: unfortunately 
it also requires mysql and launches one instance per user, using up 100Mb-odd 
of disk-space just to start, minimum, per-user (NOT very handy if you have a 
per-user quota of 200Mb). Can't be used on NFS (because of MySQL issues). 
Can't be disabled (it'll just start up again). Can't be un-installed (can't 
open emails in kmail/kontact if you do). Yummy. How wonderful, now we have to 
run MySQL (or Postgresql, although that isn't finished yet) for each user in 
order to just get our contacts, or emails...and if either crashes users cannot 
get emails (how they would be expected to know that). It also buggered up 
their chat programs (insisting on a central store for passwords, or summat).

Luckily they've also provided us with Nepomuk (to aid the 'semantic desktop') 
with a jolly search index of only 2 or 3Gb in size, depending upon the chosen 
(or not) indexing back-end. At least it can be switched off, which Akonadi 
cannot (it is claimed to be possible, but causes all sorts of crashes).

Handily, I've managed to switch it off and remove it, merely by destroying the 
installation by installing OpenSuse 11.2 over the top of it.

Suggestions for other Desktops, I think. Is there a NotK? Don't start me on 
the explosion-in-a-finger-paint-factory that is Gnome.

Rant over. Nothing to see here.
-- 

Robert Ladyman
File-Away Limited, 32 Church Street, Newtyle
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