The latest version of the Zim desktop wiki is 0.74.3 which is not available in Debian. But the user can download and install the package manual with the dpkg tool. The first impression of the software is very good. The programmers have removed the toolbar, so that it is no longer possible to format something in bold Also the search box was removed The user needs an additional click if he likes to find something.
Some things remain unchanged. The rendering of the link map takes the same huge time like in the stable version. The user is pressing the button, has to wait for 20 seconds, then a popup menu from gnome asks to quit the application at all and then after a while, a messy chart of the nodes is drawn.
One cause of the slow speed is for sure the underlying programming language. Python is known as a beginner friendly programming language which is not recommended for productive software. So it is some sort of luck, if the user doesn't loose all the important information, if the program is crashing.
A closer look into the source code will show, that the Richtext WYSIWYG editor was realized in 600 kb of Python code. Most of the code was written a while ago in the Python language and never changed. This speaks for the zim project. There is no need for using the C++ language or creating a more efficient GUI because this would need too much manpower which would be missing somewhere else, outside the zimwiki project.
Overall the zim wiki is a great improvement over the previous version 0.73.5. If the end user is not satisfied with existing Outliner tools, he will dislike the zimwiki program as well. It is a pleasure to see, that even an ArchLinux package file is provided. This Linux distribution is a great replacement for Debian and other outdated projects because ArchLinux has always the newest version of a program ...
One bug should be mentioned at the end. In contrast to the previous version, the program is asking the user if he really likes to delete a certain page in the list.