[Users] On which Linux distro is Claws Mail best supported?

[H.Merijn Brand]

On Fri, 4 Oct 2013 00:35:51 +0200, Andrej Kacian <andrej at kacian.sk>
wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Oct 2013 17:28:30 -0400
> Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> 
> > If I wanted my software to work (which I do), I'd stay well away from
> > all things KDE
> 
> A happy KDE user here, Claws Mail works like a charm. It doesn't really
> care what desktop environment you run it in. :)

Happy KDE user here too. This ML (nor the OP question) is about desktop
environment. The KDE users will probably say to stay well away from
Gnome or LXDE. The desktop seldom is a hindrance for the fine mail
client claws mail. It will work as well on any window manager as long
as the underlying OS supports the needs of CM.

> > Bottom line, you'd be much more likely to succeed with software if you
> > run a light footprint window manager.

I do not agree: when you install a "heavy" window manager, like KDE or
Gnome, it is likely that *all* dependencies needed for building
Claws-Mail are already installed.

tl;dr;

That said, I just upgraded an OpenSUSE 11.4 (was evergreen) to 12.3,
because the OS projects more and more require recent(ish) versions of
libraries that make up their GUI. With what 11.4 had available, hexchat
and Claws (my main communication tools for IRC and mail) would not
build anymore. If you choose a "stable" version of an OS, there is a
chance that the recent versions of depending libraries will not be
available for the new build of any tool in the future, and you want the
new version of that tool because it fixed one of your most annoying
bugs. I upped to OpenSUSE 12.3 with the intent to upgrade to OpenSUSE
13.1 in November, as that version is the next evergreen (with longer
support). My development box will keep upgrading to newer releases, and
history has proven that the libraries from the newer releases
/sometimes/ are enough to make new issues solved. When you install
those in a separated environment, it is possible to run most recent
tools on older OS.

I have been forced to use Ubuntu in the past month. I have no idea how
well the desktop works, because I had to deal with the system over ssh
to install system software. In times like those, you *really* learn to
appreciate OpenSUSE's "zypper" tool. All instruction on the internet
for adding printers, installing dependencies and other system-related
stuff start with something like "Click here". Extremely useless info if
you do not have the desktop available. With SUSE's zypper (a tool
that includes all functionality of rpm, apt-get, dpkg, ipkg) and yast2
(GUI, fine to use with X11 forwarding) those problems do not exist.

-- 
H.Merijn Brand  http://tux.nl   Perl Monger  http://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.19   porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/        http://www.test-smoke.org/
http://qa.perl.org   http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/