Stumbled across this ppa for Kubuntu
https://launchpad.net/~pali/+archive/kdepim-noakonadi

Have not tried myself as I have few problems with nepomuk/akonadi - but judging from comments others might be interested.

It must be 4.4.x - can anyone confirm? No other version can work without Akonadi.

einar wrote:It must be 4.4.x - can anyone confirm? No other version can work without Akonadi.

Yes. That's what they say in the description:

This PPA contains patched KDEPIM version 4.4 with *removed* Akonadi and Nepomuk.DEB Packages have epoch 5 so will replace Akonadi version of KDEPIM (which have epoch 4).

KAddressbook from this version then won't work, at least in principle, because it was ported to Akonadi in 4.4.

einar wrote:KAddressbook from this version then won't work, at least in principle, because it was ported to Akonadi in 4.4.

well I am not interested in trying it myself as I am a reasonably happy user of 4.10.4 but I am certain there are Kubuntu users willing to give it a spin. So feedback on that should be interesting, for the sake of it so to speak.

Let's be honest: there are enough users that find the nepomuk/akonadi system nothing but an unwanted nuisance and a "fork" like this is interesting to them. I myself want the updates in HTML formatting and such and following the kdepim developers mailing list I know they are hard at work.

One must be however aware that this fork, no matter how useful, may fall into the same issues faced by the Trinity developers with regards to maintenance.

Feedback from kdepim users mailing list:

God bless you, it's working now on this computer! Now I see some untranslated
strings in Kmail 1, but for me it's better than coping with certain bugs of
Kmail 2. While these bugs are being classified as bugs and solved in Kmail 2
(keep it up!), I am sending this message with Kmail 1 in Kubuntu 13.04. That
"best of both worlds" looked like science-fiction before you sent that
information.

and:

> Can you confirm that the addressbook works?
> When I read the related blog I thought that it wouldn't (4.4 addressbook is
> already Akonadi based IIRC).

I can launch:
- Kaddressbook and see all my contacts, send a message to one of them, etc.
- Kmail and see that autocompletition works, that it suggests names from the
address book, etc.

## More information

If I go to the "system settings" of Kubuntu, I see that all the options of
"semantic desktop" are disabled, as I settled them this way previously.

In Konsole, if I execute
$ akonadictl status
it answers:
Akonadi Control: stopped
Akonadi Server: stopped
Akonadi Server Search Support: not available

If I execute
dpkg -l | grep kaddressbook
it answers
[...] kaddressbook 5:4.4.11.2-0ubuntu1~raring [...]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
and yes, am aware of the possible negative aspects of using a fork but it is an option for those who for whatever reasons get headaches from the new version