hi,

I feel very strongly that the main shortcoming of Linux in general, and KDE in particular is its lack of PDA support. About the only PDA that is guaranteed with Linux is one of the old Palms, and then only if you use Jpilot, wich is a stand alone application and only uses the serial link.

Kpilot for KDE4 is severely broken, possibly because of the disastreous Akonadi decision, and after more than a year of trying to get my Treo 650 to work, I just gave up. Too buggy and too complicated and I don't think it will ever be solved.

Evolution (gpilot) does a better job, although it still has its issues.

But forget about the Palm. It is antique by now anyway. Alas, searching the internet for alternative and more modern PDAs that can sync with Linux, I see some efforts, but all of them seem to involve complicated installations and much burning of incense, and no guarantee that your 300 Euro gadget in the end will sync with Linux.

The same is true for syncing with net-based calendars or with Thunderbirds Lightning. Sometimes succes is reported, but more often failure or syncing with major issues.

I would like to impress on you all that eye candy and revolutionary new desktop tricks are all very nice, but couldn't some of that effort be canalized into better connectivity with cellphones and PDAs?

Paai.

... what's a PDA?

Madman wrote:... what's a PDA?

PDA

... what do they call them in England?

... smartphones? O.o

A PDA or Personal Digital Assistant (cellphone with contact list, calendar and todo lists) is an item that possibly is even more ubiquitous than a PC. It can also be defined as an item that is not supported by Linux

I understand the problems of writing drivers for all those brands and types. But hey! There are hundreds of different graphical cards and other peripherals, that all are supported by Linux, so why this peculiar lack of support?

I actually had a similar problem - some time ago I bought a smartphone (definitely not a PDA because it just has number keys ), and it came with a USB cable. I thought, OK, great, I should have no problem with it and Linux considering that Symbian is open-source now. Well, I've searched for days and I found nothing that would work. Apparently, the only "recommended" way is to transfer stuff over Bluetooth, since it's more standardized, but I don't have it on my computer.

I was surprised by this too. I guess people who use PDAs are to busy to work on open-source, and those who work on open-source don't need PDAs

Umm, can't you just typically plug-in devices as, "mass storage" or something? If not, then yes... that's pretty suckish...

Plugging a PDA in as mass storage does not help to sync your data. Now, if there would be an utility that synced the calendar file on the mass storage device with the PC calendar, that would be a great help... But I never found one.

But for some reason, the PDA or cellphone is a blind spot in the Linux development community. And as long as that situation lasts, there is no way that any Linux system could be called an all-round desktop.