Here are the results from the survey:
75% answered “yes” on the question whether they use kontact or not. Those who answered “no” did not get to the rest of the survey. All questions except the last two were multiple choice.
Component usage:
| 93,42% | |
| Contacts | 78,95% |
| Calendar | 77,63% |
| Feedreader | 53,95% |
| Task list | 35,53% |
| Summary | 19,74% |
| Yellow Notes | 17,11% |
| Journals | 10,53% |
| Time tracking | 9,21% |
| Other | 9,21% |
Mail protocols:
| IMAP | 72,6% |
| POP3 | 47,9% |
| Local Maildir | 17,8% |
| Other | 11,0% |
Calendar sources:
| Vcard files | 75,0% |
| Google contacts plugin | 29,4% |
| CardDAV | 11,8% |
| LDAP | 10,3% |
| Kolab etc | 10,3% |
| Other | 7,4% |
| Novell Groupwise | 1,5% |
Address sources:
| iCal file | 66,1% |
| Google calendar plugin | 32,3% |
| CalDAV | 21,0% |
| Kolab etc | 14,5% |
| Other | 11,3% |
Quality compared to other PIM applications or email clients:
| Poor | 11,1% |
| Below average | 16,7% |
| Average | 34,7% |
| Good | 33,3% |
| Excellent | 4,2% |
Has kontact improved over time:
| Improved | 23,9% |
| The same | 25,4% |
| Worse | 50,7% |
Many users, including myself, got used to the luxury of being able to do things with Kontact/Kmail in KDE 3.5 era with ease, efficiency and speed. The introduction of the akonadi/nepomuk backend was a set back for those of us. Kontact just started to look like what it used to be, but it has to get better than that. After all, we have been waiting patiently for how may years now to see this happening. Of course we are aware that this is a unilateral demand since most of us cannot contribute to the development efforts.
+1 for Hakan’s words. I used to be a die-hard kmail user with over 1.200 filters configured and over 150.000 mails stored in my kmail 1.13.6 system. But since akonadi appeared on the scene, the user experience has become messier and messier. Things just don’t work, configuration requires a computer science degree, performance becomes an issue, development of the application moves away from user’s wishes. Now, 2012, KMail2 is still a no-no, for new mails I switched to TB+Enigmail, the only problem left is how to manage the very large amount of data that are in maildir format.
I wonder what the inventor of Akonadi thinks of his software. What are the “advocates”, the Akonadiots, thinking, who drummed into everyones ears that the Akonadi way of doing things was better? In reality, the Akonadi ideology has turned into an enormous disaster which is killing KDEs credibility as a whole (no KDE program is more important the the mailer, which was ruined by Akonadi). The fact that Mandriva had to switch to Thunderbird tells it all. And, let’s face it, Akonadi has been a problem for years now, formerly kontact/KDE-sympathising people are defecting in droves, why would QA of Akonadi suddenly work? The system is too ambitious and will likely never be pulled of well. And that means the days of a nice, fast, dependable, normally-configurable user-centric KDE mailer are over. What a sad story this is!