I upgraded my LTSP installation and it stopped working again. After fixing some problems I got stuck with another one. Googling didn’t help and LTSP documentation seems to be reducing rather than expanding through the time. I’m no longer going to waste my time to get running underdocumented software with tricky dependencies so I’ve abandoned the LTSP model. Fortunately hardware didn’t make that much progress during last ten years so the old computer can still run current software directly.
When reinstalling the old computer I abandoned KDE desktop on my users’ accounts and replaced it with Xfce. Xfce is likely to be less resource demanding and easier to use. The replacement wasn’t without problems as KMail stopped working on the new installation. There were some Akonadi crashes and other problems and KMail refused to run completely on one of the user accounts. Again, Googling didn’t help, so I made another step in abandoning KDE applications. KDE is infamous for becoming quite complex without being appropriately robust and for becoming more complicated for its users. Although I still like and use some of its applications (KDM, digiKam, Okular) it’s better to avoid the rest.
However it wasn’t easy to replace KMail with another client. Such trivial features like reading incoming mail from mailbox or handling maildir format are not properly supported in some popular clients. I personally use Gnus which is an excellent client for an advanced user but it’s not suitable for my users. I ended up installing Balsa which seems to work acceptably so far. My users have just lost their contacts as KAddressBook couldn’t start as well and I haven’t found the data anywhere (was it lost?) — another reason to avoid KDE.
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