I'm an ArchLinux guy. On Sunday, I checked for updates and noticed a big blob of KDE stuff in there. I've been burned several times before but the last few updates have been OK so I went ahead with the upgrade.

Now I lost my some of the Kontact members.

I know it's not considered helpful by developers when someone throws down a blanked indictment but it is helpful. If I just leave quietly, that is equally not helpful. This is crazy. My employer would fire me if I released software with such poor testing and change control. I'm moving to claws-mail for now and probably Thunderbird long term.

Between the akonadi, nepomuk, and kmail errors, I could be a while sorting out kontact. I've done that on a few other occasions because I'm a Qt developer and a KDE user since v2 but I'm past that now.

Thanks for the good times...

From reading long discussions about the new kdepim, it seems that Arch, alone of all distros, have released it in the main repos. It is a testing release, to assess problems and solutions and as such all other distros have it in their testing repos. Sorry, but this is entirely down to Arch's decision to ignore all advice.

As far as I know it was released as 4.6.5 / KMail 2.1.1. Or where anywhere mentioned that this is KDE version that was released meant not to be released (like 4.0)? Maybe it was not a good idea to introduce so much new code that obviously wasn't well tested in a third level revision?

I have also moved to Thunderbird, running side-by-side with KMail to see if it is possible to work around the legions of new kmail bugs.

Ask yourself, if the release was a full release, why do all other distros have it in Testing?

That hardly answers the question. Are we to judge this DE based upon upstream or other distros?

Kubuntu released 4.6.5 into the Kubuntu Update PPA on the 8th, with the exception of KDE-PIM. They left that in the Experimental PPA.

Well, this is neither here nor there. Arch is a rolling release and as such, its guidelines specifically point out that upgrading isn't a fire-and-forget affair. You're encouraged to pay attention when you upgrade and watch for possible issues. In other words, if you don't know what you're upgrading to, don't.

Besides, the new kdepim has been in the kde-unstable repository for well over a year and the final release was retained in the testing repository for almost a month. If an Arch user were to update without being aware of the updates, it's nobody's fault but theirs.

Further, while the transition to the new kdepim hasn't been smooth (I had a fairly rough transition myself), it's hardly unusable — I've been using it from kde-unstable on my netbook for almost a year now...

karthikp wrote:Further, while the transition to the new kdepim hasn't been smooth (I had a fairly rough transition myself), it's hardly unusable — I've been using it from kde-unstable on my netbook for almost a year now...

I guess you have quite small mailboxes then? I've tried the new version with my gigabytes of size mailboxes (configured from scratch) and it was so slow it was nearly unusable. The last time I tried the early release was a few months ago though.. maybe it's better now?

Yeah, my mailboxes are fairly small. The biggest of them has about 14K emails and is about 2 GB in size.

The responsiveness certainly depends on the computer you're using. On my netbook, I can see status messages as it groups and threads my messages. On my desktop, it's instantaneous (I suppose the SSD helps, too).

I'm a bit conflicted when it comes to recommending the current release. On the one hand, I think it works pretty well and has all these promising features that will, no doubt, mature over subsequent releases. But on the other, it's still a beta quality in that not everything is ironed out — notably, the seemingly by-design usage of RAM as akonadi tries to index your emails into nepomuk. They should have set the niceness for that process at 19...

So, my verdict would be, try it if you're a technophile. If you want to play with something new, then play with it on a second computer, then ask yourself whether it works well enough for you to transition your main computer over.

Today I upgraded to 4.7.0 and along with it came KMail2. This time I thought I'm a bit more clever and I let not KMail to migrate its resources. After removing all Akonadi settings (https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259355) I finally managed to run KMail and created 2 new IMAP-accounts. Now I've spent the most of my evening (4+ hours) waiting for Akonadi to think through what ever it's thinking about, but it still eats all the CPU it can. KMail is unusably slow again and does not seem to do much (although I guess Akonadi is busy syncing e-mails somehow without any network traffic - I have the network monitor plasmoid to observe this). Uh-oh.. shouldn't have upgraded

Besides this I lost all my events, because Akonadi failed to migrate them or smth, but fortunately the events were not very important.

BTW, KMail was quite OK on my work PC which is dual-core 64-bit and about 4 years newer than my home PC, so I guess the evolution of KMail2 has been very good since the betas

atrox wrote:BTW, KMail was quite OK on my work PC which is dual-core 64-bit and about 4 years newer than my home PC, so I guess the evolution of KMail2 has been very good since the betas

OK, today KMail is not able to display any e-mails to me. Enough, Thunderbird time now

I've been using it without incident on my main desktop, but like I said, I would definitely recommend holding off unless you're an early adopter and are willing to suffer (and report) bugs.

@atrox: Did you remove the akonadi config files or simply delete the resources? In some cases the config files need to be totally removed to have the migration/new setup work.

bcooksley wrote:@atrox: Did you remove the akonadi config files or simply delete the resources? In some cases the config files need to be totally removed to have the migration/new setup work.

I removed the configuration files as an answer in the linked bug report was suggesting.

I saw this blog post and thought I'd try disabling Nepomuk in my not-usable-at-all KMail2 installation. I can now use KMail2 again!