Which branch to pick (was: Problem with Kontact on ubuntu 7.10)

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Tuesday 30 October 2007 11:16, ITSEF Admin wrote:
> Hm - as a *desktop*, my experiences with SuSE (10.0 in our case) are very 
> mixed. With the proko2 client, we have *lots* of vague problems here (mails
> disappearing, events disappearing, todos disappearing, contacts
> disappearing) that we just cannot track down (see several mails of mine to
> this list and -devel and several bug reports). This has lead to a general
> "Linux is unreliable as groupware workstation" attitude amongs some of our
> users, unfortunately. 

As with most other software, best is to have a contract with somebody
that makes sure critical issues are addressed timely.

Kolab-Konsortium is providing such contracts and we make the software results
available to everybody. Thus if somebody pays us to make a reliable Debian 
Sarge package, we do so and everybody else can use it. The proko2 branch
appeared this way and so the very reliable Debian Sarge packages from it.
Also Univention has a reliable KDE Kolab client packaged 
based on our services.

Thus we know that the proko2 branch is very reliable, but good operation
does not only depend on what we do in the branch, but also in the other KDE 
libraries and other configurations. KK can support this as well, but we need
to ramp up this to a point for each configuration which is quite an effort.
As we have no customer paying this effort for OpenSuse 10.0, we cannot
do packages with the same quality. Despite we would like to. :(
It also seems Novell wa not interested enough so far (we hope the change 
this as Kolab gets more and more important).

This is just an explanation why things are as they are.
And if you run a GNU/Linux workstation, you should look for a vendor 
doing the support even when you do not run Kolab or Kontact.
The problem with most vendors (e.g. Novell and Redhat) is that they do 
not have attractive offers for a small number of users and low budget.
They might be facing a problem similiar to the one I have described
for the Kolab-Konsortium above. 

> I'm still busy trying to find out what's going on (we 
> just had a survey in order to get some more and more informative feedback),
> but I was hoping that Kubuntu might fare better. Given what I read here,
> I'm wary with regard to the Enterprise client (well, it *is* still under
> development, AFAIK). Might be a good idea to get the proko2 client running
> instead...

When you are compiling things yourself, the enteprise35 client is getting
increasingly interesting to check out and try.
Kubuntu thus did the right thing to package it, 
they might just have picked a bad version. 
There will be occasional issues with it, but we are fixing them actively.

Best Regards,
Bernhard
-- 
Managing Director - Owner: www.intevation.net       (Free Software Company)
Germany Coordinator: fsfeurope.org. Coordinator: www.Kolab-Konsortium.com.
Intevation GmbH, Osnabrück, DE; Amtsgericht Osnabrück, HRB 18998
Geschäftsführer Frank Koormann, Bernhard Reiter, Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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