Notes 8: Dead by Dawn

After just under two months of loving and hating Notes 8's usability issues, it has died completely, the result of several hard drive crashes & unsolicited KDE logouts.

But in true Lotus fashion, Notes 8 leaves me with these hauntingly unhelpful messages:

This software has encountered a problem and needs to close
-- ok, but what problem?

Failed to login
-- makes sense given the previous error message
and the fact I wasn't asked to login,
but how is this helpful?

The only saving grace here is that because I installed Notes 8 on top of Notes 7, I can still run Notes 7 even though 8 is no longer functional. Of course the dictionary is now utterly corrupt so every email I try to send throws an error message until I disable spellcheck...

Error accessing User Dictionary File
-- why can't we just fail gracefully here
and skip the spellcheck with a warning?

Delivery Options... > Basic > [ ] Auto spellcheck
-- there's apparently no way to turn this off by default

... And I already miss the 'more addictive than crack' 'cached locally for better performance' 'not just the IBMers' typeahead name lookup functionality of Notes 8 (which I got addicted to thanks to GMail, and Lotus had the good sense to adopt too).

Still, at least Notes 7 is quasi-functional enough to make do until I have time to reinstall the whole thing from scratch, or Notes 8.0.1 is released next year, whichever comes first.

And really, I can't fault Notes (entirely) for its early demise. Then again, everything else on the machine works great despite the crashes... well, everything except:

• Konqueror won't let me save bookmarks anymore.
• I get unexpectedly logged out from KDE when I leave the machine alone for a while.
• When left alone for long periods, sometimes the screen dies and the only way to ressurect it is with the klaatu verada nikto-like incantation of Alt-PrtSc-S, Alt-PrtSc-U, Alt-PrtSc-B.
• My cursor will disappear after about 6hrs and only be visible on the secondary screen as a purplish narrow rectangle. Ever try using a mouse when you can't see the pointer? It's about as much fun as boxing with your computer.

Yes, it's so time to upgrade to a new OS.