Hello everyone,

I would like to share my little experience on migrating from windows to Kubuntu, expecially in the field of synchronization of a pocket PC with Kontact. This feature is mandatory for my wife so I could not avoid it.

0/ Disclaimer
IMHO, some packaging and installation matters stroke me, so I thought it might be interesting for the KDE community. Some of them might be related to Kubuntu itself, but I am not capable to point them out.
I am a researcher in computer and electronic science, but not a FOSS guru. Excuse me in advance if I misunderstood some usually accepted rules, or if I missed something.
The purpose of my post is to point out some problems for any KDE end-user.

1/ Documentation
I found it extremly hard to find up-to-date and valuable reference information. I found several hacks, uncomplete tutorials, ...
Although it is an interesting technical problem for curious technical people, but it is not acceptable for end user.

2/ Integration
2.1/ command line vs GUI
* As a Linux end-user, if I want to perform some specific processing, say convert and resize all my videos, I am going to look for an exhaustive tool (e.g. ffmpeg), crawl through the man pages, and find my own very special command. No GUI could help on that, unless it has dozens of tabs, ...
* On the contrary, when I install kdepim (or any desktop tool), I expect all of this to ... work ! Or, at most I imagine to fill in some pieces of information during first startup. Kontact, Korganize, ... are very well integrated in that manner.

2.2/ synce-kpm + synce + opensynce + msynctool + ...
For synchronization, I had to deal with a mixed environnement, with both high-end softwares (synce-kpm) and low-level CL tool (e.g. msynctool), whereas there are some otherlaps between them :
- some functions may be performed by both (e.g. create a partnership, with synce-kpm of msynctool)
- some other cannot (e.g. create a group with msynctool)

It is the most confusing situation I met, since it does not respect a common rule : one tool = one usage.

In that aspect, there is probably some big potential improvements in the definition of packages.

3/ Conclusion
To me, the big problem are the integration and packaging, more than the documentation itself.

In addition to that, note that at this time, I still have to find a way to automate the synchro (lke ActiveSync does), maybe thanks to some udev rules or so. The story is not over yet.

Thanks for reading.
I hope it is clear enouhg.
Feel free to contact me if needed.

--
Fred

Not sure if this is related but is it really really hard to implement ActiveSync right into Kmail/Kontact/Akonadi?

I believe Linux is the only platform today which does not provide a satisfactory solution. When I say satisfactory, I mean not jumping hoops with davmail etc.

Since KDE4 is now complete desktop features wise, would it not make sense to concentrate on making its applications more integrated into "office" world? This of course implies playing nice with MS products and protocols. Now that KDE4 is available for Windows platform too, I believe this push is now almost overdue.

Thanks for listening.