Evolution and digiKam – converser.nz

UPDATE: Unfortunately in practice Evolution has turned out to be another poorly supported piece of open source software that is only getting minimal updates and bug fixes. It is not too much exaggeration to say its support for Imap resembles that of Outlook that it tries to emulate. As far as I can tell the software has not had a major update since 2012. If all the bugs were fixed it would be great software, but because there are serious issues like not being able to connect to calendars, and hanging when sending or receiving messages, and stuff that makes it unreliable, then I have to go back to using Thunderbird, which at least is dependable even with the (relatively minor) issues that it has.

As noted the main issue with Thunderbird is its inability to reliably update counts in additional Imap folders other than the Inbox. One way around this is to have, as I do now, three general purpose email accounts which are graded as low, medium and high priority.

Having written about both last time I am getting more into depth this time around taking a serious look at what I can do with both pieces of software.

Evolution as an email package is written to emulate the look and feel of Outlook. It is of course much superior and also better than Thunderbird in some ways. At the moment the biggest thing for me is when using filters and labels to move messages to different folders. Thunderbird handles this poorly by not updating the subfolders until you actually enter them. Evolution’s performance is better in this regard. Its limitation however is that it doesn’t have the different folder view options like selecting favourite folders than Thunderbird provides. However, you can choose to unsubscribe from folders – I dislike Gmail automatically marking messages as important or starred and putting them into these folders, so I can unsubscribe from them and not have them wasting space in Evolution.

Since Evolution has turned out to have superior performance to Thunderbird I have decided to use Evolution for my day to day stuff and use Thunderbird for the accounts I am closing down until they close, it looks like Evolution can handle Gmail and Google Calendars and Contacts quite well without problems and Thunderbird has a lot of issues with not updating the counts in additional folders very well so I am working to implement this decision.

digiKam is an interesting piece of software that I need to evaluate further as well, one of the key considerations is whether it could take over from using a Windows computer to download and rename the photos from cameras. At the moment the key issue is whether I can get it to connect to any of my cameras. Initially Debian did not recognise a camera out of the box and it seemed the issue would be that the necessary capabilities are not by default enabled in Debian. When I tried plugging it into the mediapc running Xubuntu 17.10 it was detected and mounted immediately. After looking at some stuff with Debian I installed a package called pmount, and then plugged the camera back into the mainpc, and it was detected and mounted automatically as a USB mass storage device. digiKam has been able to import pictures from the camera and I am now testing it further to see how useful it might be and what I can do with it.