I think i understand the frustration with kde, i just hate it sometimes - too much fiddling to get rid of halfbaked stuff. I'm in the middle of testing tiling wms like subtle and scrotwm for a migration path to a lighter wm. I still like few things in kde, konsole, okular, taskbar can be customized to my liking with the help of 'Smooth Tasks' plasmoid, awful plasma notifications can be replaced with colibri notifications, it makes kde experience quite nice in the end. Ouch, just remembered, cannot ditch kde yet because i have a lot of *.war web archives which are only readable by konqueror.

Nevertheless, i have clock and calendar with holidays and everything running, and i don't have any akonadi processes in stock kde of 13.37. Neither i use any pim apps or nepomuk in my netbook and have left all indexing to be handled by 'recoll'.

For a file manager i suggest to try out 'ranger' - ncurses based file manager available from slackbuilds, someone mentioned it in LQ, cool app.

erm, konqueror runs in other de/wm's (just trying to help speed up your migration...)

cheers,

For anyone that hates the file indexer (which is not actually akonadi) you can turn it off like so :-

1. Open the K Menu
2. Go to "Computer" and click on "System Settings"
3. On the 2nd row click "Desktop Search"
4. Deselect "Enable Nepomuk Semantic Desktop"
5. Click "Apply" at the bottom right

FYI On my system Nepomuk reports that it has a 6.2GB database, the total for my home directory is 11GB if they think this is working then I have a bridge to sell.

Yes, that's right. But that's a different issue.
I was discussing just Akonadi and mainly the dependence of the clocks in Kde on Akonadi.

Yes, but if you launch an app that depends on Kde libs then a big chunk of Kde gets loaded too.
Same goes for Gnome dependent apps.
A lot of people don't like having every lib under the sun loaded just to open an addressbook.
If you use Xfce for DE but use Evolution for email and also open Kaddressbook (for whatever reason) you end up with libs for three different DEs loaded and gazillion tasks running.
It would not be a problem in a perfect world where software has no bugs and memory leaks but unfortunately that's not the case.
So it's not as much a matter of memory (RAM) use (ram is cheap and most have plenty installed these days) but mainly system responsiveness and stability.