I have been a KDE user, on and off, since 1998. Always a “KDE fan”, but never really a “Kontact, Kmail, Korganizer, akonadi” fan. Though the KDE PIM has improved somewhat since previous KDE generations, I still find it awkward, difficult, complicated and unreliable. I got it working in Fedora 40/Plasma 6.2, but it already acted up a couple of times. I can have Thunderbird mail, with my Google Calendar, Mail.com contacts running in minutes and it stays reliable. Also, the improved Evolution is very handy to setup and works.
I have in the past uninstalled Kontact and Akonadi and never had a problem. I’d like to be a good KDE citizen, is it a cardinal sin to get rid of Kontact and Akonadi? In my exprerience, all non-PIM KDE apps are running just fine when akonadi is gone, but I have almost a gig more RAM now available.
The way I uninstall/disable Kontact/akonadi: stop all akonadi processes, then just uninstall akonadi* and the PIM apps are gone. You can also disable akonadi with the akonadictl command if you don’t want to actually uninstall it.
Would it be the time, and actually less work, to create an all new, more modern PIM for KDE, rather than fix the Kontact/akonadi year after year?
Yes, sadly agreed here - but ‘akonadi’ is a ton of stuff, and limited use is fine - I use KAlarm which works well and - well, I think just about nothing else… but akonadi-mime is needed for that, and also akonadi-contacts are installed and needed by kalarm.
@hannu
Can you share the commands you used for disabling and uninstalling Akonadi. Stopping Akonadictl works until I restart the system
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You’re using a different package manager… @hannu is using fedora, and even if they changed their command from ‘dnf’ to read ‘apt’ the packages are likely different…
Akonadi is a required component for many KDE PIM applications, such as kmail, kontact, and kalarm.
These applications will likely autostart Akonadi - to disable Akonadi startup, you’ll need to identify and disable the applications that rely on it.
Thanks for the clarification @ben2talk
I’ve removed kmail, knotes, kjots, korganizer, kalarm, akregator, kaddressbook, and kontact.
Then sudo apt autoremove has removed akonadi-server.
This is how I removed akonadi from Fedora, and how I would remove it in a .deb system:
su - (to become root)
ps aux | grep akonadi (will list all akonadi processes)
kill -s 9 akonadi* (kills all akonadi processes)
dnf remove akonadi* (removes akonadi)
in Debian, Buntus, Mint:
apt-get purge akonadi (purge rather than remove, deletes conf files as well)
reboot, see if anything is left:
ps aux | grep akonadi
- see if the akonadi related PIM programs are there, Fedora removed them as soon as akonadi was gone
- some system seem to understand the * wildcard, some don’t.
Hannu
Not necessarily! The KDE-PIM 3.8 worked better as the new one!
That didn’t work for me in Fedora 41. It looks like kill does not recognize the * wildcard.
But I didn’t even have to kill any Akonadi tasks, I just ran dnf remove akonadi* and it removed all akonadi bits and pieces and it also removed some associated components, then dnf autoremove didn’t find anything else. Then I rebooted, all akonadi processes are no longer running and so far nothing seems to be broken. I don’t use any of the related applications.
You don’t need to kill anything. Just akonadictl stop. And that’s not really necessary either, as removing the related packages and rebooting should do.
Thank you. Noted for future installs 