The orginal reason to get rid of #akonadi was that it seemed to be the only thing that used the #mysqld instance running on my laptop, and since I can't work out how to use #mysql I was going to get rid of that too. Turns out an awful lot of other packages seem to link to it in some way or another, and I couldn't even get #mariadb service to start up when I installed that. So I'll live with a useless mysqld process. And use #postgresql if I need an actual database for anything.