If I was Gulleen, I’d use Gnome, but I’m not

I’m actually Kulleen. And so, it really only makes sense that I’m pre-ordained to use KDE, right?

Well, I never subscribed to that belief. In fact, I’ve been an avid Gnome user since forever. I love everything about gnome: GTK+, Evo, nautilus, the works. And it only seemed to get better and better. Well, except for Evolution which only seemed to regress. Things finally came to a head on Monday, and I’ll tell you how.

So, I discovered two pieces of functionality in Evo: the first is “tasks” and the second is “memos”. Now, with these two things, I could put down my task list, share it with my boss, email it, watch it, update it, etc. And, if I have a meeting, I just create a new memo for that date and time and voila, instant meeting notes. Really, it’s lovely. And both functionalities allow you to attach files.

That’s all very well, and my productivity was definitely on the up and up because of it. Monday morning, I fire up my work laptop, and when I press a specific memo (to read or edit), evo crashes. I’ve no idea why it started or what causes it, but bug buddy doesn’t even fire up. It’s just a stupid traceback in the terminal or .xsession-errors.

Well, since I do depend on this functionality pretty heavily, I decided to listen to George and try out Kontact. That led me to have a chat with Diego about the functionality I needed. Turns out — well, Diego said it best:

ah, generic calendar support then?

And well, kmail and korganizer and whatever else can do it just fine. So after installing kontact last night, I ran it in my gnome environment and it looked just fine with the functionality. At that point, I thought I might as well just try out KDE again after all these years, since I’ll be loading up most of its libraries anyway. This morning the computer was done installing kde-meta, and I was ready to go. I spent a little time here and there customising my new kde desktop (though I’m still far from done). I mainly spent time configuring kontact and importing the memos (journals in korganizer) and tasks (to-dos in korganizer) and contacts (or kontacts, I suppose, now). Now, the integration between kopete and kontact is a lot tighter than gaim and evolution ever got.

I’ll give you an example. I like to have my gaim contacts and my evolution contacts to be relatively in sync. So, with two of my evo contacts, I tried adding them to gaim. And that was all fine and dandy, until the next time I opened up evo’s contacts list and saw 20 duplicated entries for just the gaim portion of both contacts. WTF? Anyway, kopete hasn’t done that yet. However, it seems to flake out on a few off-line contacts in that it doesn’t show their identities at all, and when you click on properties you just get told they’re not online. It’s broken behaviour, for sure.

Meanwhile, my foray into KDE is going quite well so far, I think I’ll stay for a while. Evo still has me for the next week or two so if that bug gets sorted I still may make an early exit from KDE, but who knows? I like what I see so far.