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I've spent a lot of time looking into this and am as frustrated as you. I'm building out a small consulting company based on Linux, and the basis of it all - e
by zafiro17 9y ago
I've spent a lot of time looking into this and am as frustrated as you. I'm building out a small consulting company based on Linux, and the basis of it all - email, contacts, calendars - is a fiasco. I went to Evolution as a client, which handles all of the above. Thunderbird does mail but its contact solutions require LDAP, not CardDav and its calendar solutions are bolted on, not integral. Linux devs spent a lot of time working on the "replacement for Outlook" in the early 2000s before giving up and spending their energy blowing up Gnome2's otherwise-perfectly functioning DE instead. My two go-to solutions on Linux desktops are Evolution, as mentioned, and the web client for Fastmail, which offers email, calendaring and contact sharing. Thunderbird is behind. There's a recent new add-on that purports to deal with carddav and caldav in Thunderbird, but it's still got a rough edge or two, and annoyingly, remains an "add-on" which aesthetically sends the wrong signal. On KDE, Kontact (encompassing Kmail, Korganizer for calendars and Kontact) works very well for my techie colleagues but is a bit weird for non-technical staff. I've also looked at Zimbra and the former Zarafa (now Kopano) and Kolab and some others, and Fastmail's web client remains the easiest and friendliest solution, while Evolution remains the best desktop client capable of handling IMAP/CALDAV/CARDDAV. It's annoying though. On Windows I'd just install emClient and call it a day (and would avoid Outlook, which I desperately dislike).
- dredmorbius 9y agoKDE's Kontact PIM has been best-of-breed general office communications on Linux in my experience. It doesn't suffer GNOME disease, it has mail, contacts, calendar, RSS, and if you want, a browser. It's reasonably stable and robust. My principle preference remains console tools -- Mutt, lbdb, and a mash of other tools, or the Emacs world -- but that's not what the general end-user probably wants. I've also found Sylpheed is an exceptionally good "just email and contacts" application. Fast, light, and simple. https://www.kde.org/applications/office/kontact/ https://www.kde.org/applications/office/kontact/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/ http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/
- PuffinBlue 9y agoThanks for these suggestions. I, at least, am going to try them. I've used Thunderbird for years, then recently switched to Evolution and Gnome. But whilst gnome looks pretty I'm not really finding it a good fit for me. This gives me a final shove to try KDE so thanks for that.
- javitury 9y agoI'm surprised you see Evolution as a solution Before I switched away from Gnome I had Evolution set up. It was slow, you couldn't make more than one operation at a time and notifications worked randomly. Even if you had new email, Evolution sometimes decided not to notify you for days. Reminders and synchronization of calendar and tasks were even worse.