KDE's Kontact vs. GNOME's Evolution: Best Personal Info Manager?

Jun 29, 2009, 15:34 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Bruce Byfield)

[ Thanks to James Maguire for this link. ]

"Like most of GNOME, Evolution has a minimalist industrial look. It consists of five modules: email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and memos. None of these modules looks as though it were designed with much reference to the others, although sharing information between them is reasonably straightforward.

"By contrast, Kontact still retains much of the informal look of KDE 4. In addition to the modules found in Evolution (some differently named), it includes modules for RSS feeds, popup notes, and tracking the time to do each task. All its modules have their own names and can be run without Kontact, but go mostly unnamed within it. The design throughout all the Kontact applications is more consistent than in Evolution's, which reflects the greater unity of appearance in KDE than in GNOME. In addition, because all the applications depend on KDE's PIM engine Akonadi, they tend to open faster than Evolution's, too.

"One useful module in Kontact is Summary, which lets you see at a glance what new messages you have, as well as upcoming events and deadlines. However, in other places, Kontact is less user-friendly than Evolution. In particular, settings such as email templates and the default names of message filters are written in pseudo-code that might intimidate inexperienced users. Nor are inexperienced users likely to know the distinction between Ham (wanted mail) and Spam that appears on the icons. "

Complete Story

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