Re: KNode

[Martin Steigerwald <martin@lichtvoll.de>]

Hi.

Robert B. Carleton - 02.09.25, 13:55:34 CEST:
> On Saturday, August 30, 2025 4:04:33 AM Central Daylight Time Marc
> Mezzarobba wrote:
> [...]
> 
> > FWIW, Trinity still ships a working version of KNode. It doesn't
> > integrate perfectly with current KDE software, but it's better than
> > nothing. (In fact I am using it to write this very message.)
> 
> So, I hadn't looked into the Trinity desktop in the past. I did enough
> research to find the trinitydesktop.org web site, and found that Debian
> provides some support for it. Does TDE have something like Kontact, or
> do you use the mail, calendar, and contacts separately?

*** TDE is not supported by Debian. Not at all. ***

That is at least what I know.

But their developers are providing Debian packages. TDE is basically a KDE 
3 fork. AFAIK it does contain pre-Akonadi KDEPIM including Kontact, KMail 
and Korganizer.

I never tried it so I cannot really say anything about the quality. While 
the team for current KDEPIM is quite small, I still bet there are still 
more developers working on current KDEPIM than on TDE's KDEPIM 3 fork. 
Also AFAIK while having done some porting to newer Qt versions they still 
rely (partly) on Qt versions that are out of support since a long time. 
This adds to the maintenance burden. And they have to do their own 
packages for distributions.

Although pre-Akonadi has some charm, I still remember KMail startup being 
delayed greatly if for some reason a index file for a mail folder needed 
to be rebuilt. KDEPIM 3 had its own set of issues. Not sure how much 
Trinity developers have improved it. But at least it may still contain 
KNode¹. I am not sure whether TDE can be installed alongside with current 
Plasma, KDE Frameworks, KDE Gear and other KDE application packages as a 
separate desktop environment that can be chosen in display manager. Maybe 
it would even be possible to just install KNode and dependencies along 
side current Plasma and KDEPIM - with some increased memory usage due to 
loading of more libraries. However… none of that would be supported by 
Debian!

Even though things are still not perfect with Akonadi especially with POP3 
mail reception, with SQLite3 as database it got a lot better. I even got 
full text indexing to complete successfully.

If you do try TDE, and need help, please check the Trinity project web 
site for support resources¹. It may still be possible to use your existing 
locally stored mails, events and contacts with KDEPIM 3. However, unless 
someone from the Trinity project or some Trinity users can help you, you 
would be completely on your own with that.

TDE is definitely not supported by any means by the Debian/Kubuntu Qt/KDE 
team. And in case any of their packages cause interference with Plasma and 
KDE stuff as packaged for Debian officially, I bet you just get to keep 
the breakage.

My decision is to rather use the current Plasma and KDE stuff. Especially 
as it got a whole lot better than in KDE SC 4 times. A huge lot. Of course 
if you like to have a Usenet reader… then it cannot be KNode currently.

[1] https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/tdepim/tree/knode

[2] https://www.trinitydesktop.org - currently quite slow to respond here

Best,
-- 
Martin