We mentioned KDE Kube, a promising KDE email and PIM suite, earlier this year — and we’re pleased to report that there’s a brand new release available for testing.
Now don’t get too excited: while what’s on offer today is more than a tech preview, Kube “still isn’t anywhere near production ready” according to one of its developers, Christian Mollekopf.
But Mollekopf adds that he is now able to use Kube for ‘most’ of his email needs — which is a pretty decent achievement!
Kube 0.3.1 is “a very important milestone”
Kobe pitches itself as a “modern communication and collaboration client”. It’s built using QtQuick and sits top of a ‘high performance, low resource usage core’.
The client aims to offer a full suite of personal information management, including email, contacts, a calendar, notes and todo’s and more.
Among the features working in the latest release is a basic email composer, support for reading encrypted and signed mails, and basic email management (sending, receiving, reading, etc). A basic CardDAV based address book is also included.
“This release marks a very important milestone on our road to a production ready release and I’m very happy to have a lot of issues, that have been bothering us for long, finally resolved. I also think that while we’ll still have to do one or the other large change every now and then, the codebase can now start to settle as we have resolved our largest problems.”
But while the milestone is a significant one it’s not yet ready for prime-time use, as Mollekopf cautions in his post.
There’s no clean upgrade path; emails can only be sent in plaintext; and passwords are stored in plaintext. Scrolling issues are also reported.
Excited by what you’ve read? You should be! Kube has the potential to become a standout app for the KDE desktop (and for Linux in general).
For now you can learn more about the project at kube.kde.org, where you’ll find details on how to get involved and how to build the app for first-hand testing.