Re: [Evolution] About performance

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> > To be honest most of the grouching about the stability and speed of Evo
> > seems to be coming from Ubuntu users
>
> Or people with *unbelievably* ancient versions.  Every time I see
> someone complaining about 2.32 or even 2.28... my jaw drops.  I just
> don't get it - why do that to yourself?

As others have said, these are the versions on current *supported*
distros.  Specifically RHEL 5 (and consequently CentOS 5, Scientific
Linux 5 etc.) is on Evolution version 2.12.3; RHEL 6 (and clones) is on
2.28.3.

The whole point of RHEL is stability, not cutting edge, consequently
they stick to versions of software that are consistent and they back
port bug fixes where appropriate.  To be honest I've never had any
complaints from my users about the instability or speed of Evolution on
CentOS 5 or 6 (but that may be more to do with my users!).

BTW, the use of 2.32.x versions is because that's the last version
before Gnome 3 came out - so those distros that don't like Gnome 3 (and
I've never understood why) use Gnome 2.32 and hence that version of
Evolution.

What worries me is not the use of old (and distro supported) versions,
it's the experience of users with current versions on some distros that
don't match with the experience of users elsewhere.  Bad packaging of an
application on something like Ubuntu, because it is so popular, reflects
very badly on that application as a whole. It is how myths about
software start - it becomes received wisdom that, say, Evolution is slow
and buggy because 50% of all Linux users tried to use it on Ubuntu/Mint
and gave up and switched to Thunderbird; 3 years down the line the
mantra that Evolution is crap will still be repeated time and again on
user forums.

I don't know what can be done about it.  Certainly with Ubuntu there's
no point - they have already decided that Thunderbird is their supported
MUA, so there isn't going to be much official appetite for improving the
user experience of Evolution.

P.