revisiting kde 4.7 revisited

By basd on Sep 10, 2011 | In kde4, linux, opensuse, -arghhh!!

truth be said, after a[nother] wasted day, the Acer One and the LT3101u are running much better. and both are running KDE 4 (though forget about effects on the Acer.)

but ... but ... but ...

Well, KDE has this master vision to use nepomuk (searching) and akonadi (PIM system). Which, quite frankly, as far as I can tell, don't actually do useful but use up cpu and battery. SO WHY ARE THEY ON BY DEFAULT???

On my installs, one of the first things I do is turn off the nepomuk indexing. But, I don't know how to clear whatever database it creates before I manage to get it shut off. Then, KDE regularly complains that it is not running. But what for? I never do any of the tagging and searching these were intended for, plus most of my stuff is "in the cloud". Plus, I want to conserve battery and cpu useage.

Akonadi is a PIM master database system that has been in KDE 4 for awhile -- and so far, has never done anything useful. Don't take my word for it, at this link they explain -- in 4.6 it finally implemented managing your master contact list and in 4.7 it became the basis for KMail, Kjots, Kcalendar and the like. EXCEPT I AM NOTusing any of these. So why are several instances of Akonadi daemons and its mysqld eating up 67% of my cpu???

Akonadi autostarts. The article tells you how to shut it down, and how to tell it not to start in the first place if you want to dig around in config files oddly not placed within .kde. But the article also warns you it may then be gone but not forgotten, plasma widgets SUCH AS the default digital clock in the panel will start it up again.

You know, the thing I like about linux is not having someone in Redmond or Silicon Valley tell me how I should use my computer. IE, loading it up with cpu wasting stuff I have no intention of using.

Wouldn't it be nice if KDE wasn't intent on doing the same thing?

And I have to admit that conceptually the Akonadi project sounded pretty good when I first looked at it years ago. I started searching around for something that actually used it. But no. And, as you can tell from my blog entries about my wars with IMAP clients, it's not likely to soon be of much use to me.

Could we please have the default be OFF instead of ON???