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Member since:The thing however that in the end really made me switch over was kmail. When they "upgraded" the mailbox format from 3.3 to 3.4, I almost lost thousands of archived emails.
Ah yes, that happened to me when moving from 3.1 to 3.2. They didn't change the mailbox format, but they fixed some bugs in it so it more closely matched the spec. So of course, my old buggy kmail had saved messages incorrectly, and the new kmail would not read them. I ended up writing a perl script to go through my emails and correct the errors in them - then I got kmail to re-index my mailbox. Really beyond the abilities of a non-techy user!
I'm not looking forward to trying to move my 15k+ emails to another mail client. I will likely choose thunderbird (can it read maildir format?), because it is cross platform (and I use it at work on Windows).
Member since:2005-07-06
I read through the horror stories, and I am amazed that there is still some belief that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop.
Until the focus is put on solving the user's problems and not making life easy for the lazy developer (who obviously could not be bothered to write a data migration utility), Linux is not going anywhere on the desktop.
Member since:
Interesting, I had the same experiences and finally gave up on KDE (and that after being a loyal KDE user for more than 3 years). Gnome is quite a bit cleaner and faster and things in most cases just seem to work, similar to OS-X.
I do hope that KDE will really work on a complete redesign, simplify and make it look more professional. In particular eliminate duplicate (sometimes triplicate) applications by default to clean up the menu. Instead of having three separate projects for a particular application, they should really be more forceful and scrap the ones that are not as good and focus on the ones that do work well.
The thing however that in the end really made me switch over was kmail. When they "upgraded" the mailbox format from 3.3 to 3.4, I almost lost thousands of archived emails. Upon checking, this was deemed part of "improved features", something that for a production systems is just simply unacceptable. This is an example that the quest for more and more features and options in KDE comes often at the cost of compatibility, which for a production system is just unacceptable. I ended up moving to Thunderbird for emails, Firefox for browsing and Gnome as a desktop, a combination that I found to be more appealing and most importantly, more stable.