I have always defended KDE4 in various forums and I love it. Though I'm an amateur, I have tested the betas, sent debugging reports and donated money to the KDE project. I've used KDE since 2001. So it takes a lot to make me complain about KDE. But, when I upgraded to 4.7 on openSUSE 11.4, I found Kontact unusable:


KMAIL: KMail could no longer find my folders. When I did managed to add my mail folders to KMail, Akonadi with virtuoso-t and Nepomuk ran for hours trying to index them. All my memory (RAM and swapfile) was used up. On reboot, the CPU stuck at 99.8% for hours. Spamassassin thinks it has to re-check all my old emails and I cannot kill any of these processes.


CALENDAR: I cannot open my std.ics in the Calendar in Kontact and when I try to import it the error message "There is no resource available" will not go away. When I tried to kill that process the CPU spiked and I had to reboot.


ADDRESSBOOK: The addresses were there along with what looked like code (unreadable).


Things I did:


I downgraded to the pre-4.7 Kontact.

KMAIL: I can now see all my folders and akonadi et al are not running any more and things are fine.

CALENDAR: I still cannot import std.ics.

ADDRESSBOOK: the app has entirely disappeared from the Kontact menu.


I have followed the advice on the KDE site and used akonadiconsole to choose the Standard Addressbook and pointed it to my std.vcf file. I have also told it that I want to use the Standard Calendar and pointed it to my std.vcs file. akonadiconsole tells me that each component is 'ready'. I have quitted Kontact, I have rebooted....I still do not have my std.ics calendar back and there is still no addressbook app at all.

I do not need the indexing services Nepomuk is said to provide, just as I do not need Strigi for my desktop data. I have very good control of my PIM and desktop data. I have spent two days trying to get Kontact to work. I do not have the time to send debug reports. I'm posting this in despair at what has happened to Kontact and my plea is:


Allow us to upgrade KDE while giving us a clear choice between using the Akonadi assisted Kontact and the Standard Kontact.

+1

I stopped using Kontact for the same reason. I love it before all the performance issues with Akonadi. I still prefer Kontact to Thunderbird which I am currently using but at least it works reasonably fast without chewing up RAM and CPU with zero improvement in end user functionality.

Kontact or Kmail devs please please please make Akonadi as an optional backend along with the old maildir implementation which worked so well.

Easiest way would be to not upgrade the kdepim package.

All libraries in that package are private so other applications will not depend on a newer version and it is unlikely that any application directly depends on specific version of a kdepim application.

Cheers,
_