As many of you could easily understand, I’m not talking about the human evolution, but about the PIM software Evolution.

It’s generally a good software, although I thing there is much space to improve, much more than what Evolution has done in the last few years.

Today a classic case has happened again. I started Evolution, and immediately clicked the Calendar button. Unfortunately I was too quick, and I pressed the holy button before Evolution had finished loading the mail component, which is the default component loaded at start.

What happened next? Evolution has frozen and trying to close its window made my computer ask whether I want to forcedly terminate the program. I had no choice and I killed it.

The problem is that Evolution doesn’t want to start again, unless I go and find the evolution-data-server process to kill it as well. If not, Evolution will actually launch (you can see the correspondent process in the system monitor, or in “top”) but will never appear, waiting for some God-only-knows event.

Actually it’s quite probable that the standard users don’t know about that: the only choice for them is to restart the computer, or at least end the session and login again. This is absolutely unacceptable: if you like to restart when things go wrong, you could just use Windows.

I hope this problem (along many others) have been solved in the 2.24 version (I’m using 2.22 which is included in Ubuntu Hardy). However, I don’t count on it. Let’s see a few weeks later, after upgrading to Intrepid.