Hi there everybody!

First of all before you get me wrong: I admire KDE and use since about 5 years and know that there is huge amounts of work going into it.
But what bothers me is that I am adapting appllications, start working with them just to find out that they aren't the way to go suddenly anymore.
Especially in KDE PIM where huge amounts of data are set up any change in formats and applications is a huge problem. I understand that the KDE team cannot provide every feature and bugfree software but there is a serious lack of communication of what is the way KDE PIM is going.

My efforts to still use KDE PIM after the chnages that came with KDE 4 and especially kmail2 have cost me a lot of time and money. Me being stubborn to believe things would quickly improve was a big blunder on my part but not to warn user about the serious problems and shifts in so called "stable releases" and offer a fallback way in case of huge showblocker regressions.

What I am talking about is (note that everything worked before and there's been no notification about the regress that will take place and note also that we're in KDE 4.8.2 stable(!):

Kaddressbook:
- no way to set up any view or listing for my contacts, no filters or choose by category (how is a user supposed to work with this, seriously, this is just not a usable in any productive sense)
- no setting up a print layout for labels or lists in any way (what to do with my contacts if I can't use them not even on envelopes, letters or listings?)
- still no way to integrate into libreoffice or calligra that is userfriendly as I know of (as the projects homepage states: it's work in progress, I get that, but why replace a working solution with a new one that can still not do the most basic things?)
- though everything seems to be database based now there isn't any synchronization possibility with other common address sources (that is the status of addressbooks 10 years ago ...)
Question: willl these issues be resolved, what is the timeline here, will the project be going on or be replaced again?

Kmail2 (I won't rant about all the migration/lost mail/detroyed bodies and indices issues here but this was serious trouble for anyone working productivly with KDE PIM):
- no way to set namespace/rootfolders in imap accounts (a necessity for many group collaboration setups)
- "remove duplicates" in a mail folder doesn't work anymore (my favorite feature working with thousands of archived mails)
- still no possibility to simply manually order the folder and account list not even the favorite folders (anyone try working with more than ten accounts - good luck!)
- no working spam filtering for imap, but instead the effort alone can mess up everything (this is a complete showstopper - any emailclient should be able to apply spam filtering to incoming mail, that's not even a point of discussion)
- autocompletion of email addresses still doesn't work correctly - so not even the integration of two Kontact application via akonadi seems to work ... (annoying)
Question: Are these regressions we have to live with or is anyone willing to put his or her word out there in saying: "Don't worry I can fix this and I will do it soon."?

Kjots:
- not much to say, homepage is still talking about KDE 4.2, probably just an abandoned project ... (thx for the warning!)
Question: for three years there's talk about basket being integrated, obviously won't happen, though one of the best notetaking apps out there, kjots not going on though at least a nice setup thouh lacking in features, knotes not more than a pinned postit, - is this the integration of applications that akonadi should provide? Is there seriously no plans for a modern notetaking programm with synchronization, html and picure support and mini-wiki functionality? It's all been there before! Please someone official: What's the status on this?

Kjournal:
- doesn't have any documentation whatsoever, I can't figure out how to use it (I used to use journaling for my workflow for clients with linking to documents and auto-listing of changes to documents about 7 years ago ... now nothing anymore)
- on the KDE PIM homepage it's not even mentioned, what a mess!
Question: WHat is kjournal supposed to do and how can a user make it work for him? Is this still part of Kontact or just anoher dead end?

ktimetracker:
- a beauty I worked with it everyday, doesn't work anymore because it crashes when setting the starting date for a new task to track and takes down the whole Kontact suite with it! (I don't get how such a bug doesn't prevent the program for being included in a stable release)
Question: Does anyone care? I don't see any efforts on the bugtracker , no information apart from: "it doesn't work at the moment", last official information I find is about one year old, so whats the status ?

I leave it to others to comment on Knode, Aggregator, the mssing synchronization features in korganizer, the "no way to get your mobilephone data into your contact" and stuff. Feel free to use this thread.

To get things in perspective:
Every morning I sit down at my computer and look at my desktop, which happens to be KDE for good reasons, and I am happy not to rely on MS or Apple and thankful for all that work that went into KDE 4. Though I think it could be less work for developers if things got better planned but everybody should work how it suits him or her. The thing is, I sometimes don't get the impression that developers respect their user fanbase as much as the users do. KDE should step up before a stable release and say: hey guys, we've accomplished alot but if you work and depend on the application xy than be warned: many of your workflow assets won't be included anymore. plz look at this list of regressions. and plz be aware that this application might be stable but it will take us about three years to add all the features you got used to. That is the least that should be done.

If free software is all about freedom of choice, for developers and user, than I need the information BEFORE I make choices otherwise my choices will be very random and sometimes harmful. I lost a lot(!) of time, even some money trying to reestablish a productive workflow with KDE PIM just to find out that it will not be possible at the current status. That is harmful, disrepectful and simply not necessary. It hurts the reputation of KDE, the developers himself and the generously assumed millions of users that try to get along with all this day by day ...

To sum it up:
What is the honest current (!) status of KDE PIM, which applications will really be integrated into KDE and what are the timelines for that to be done?
(sry I dont find the KDE PIM homepage very helpful in this respect)


thx for reading,
piedro