Gnome 2.12 and Evolution 1.6.0… sucks!

Gnome 2.12 and Evolution 1.6.0… sucks!

So I’ve run into my first pet peeve with SUSE Linux 10.1 (now renamed to openSUSE).

My company is very Microsoft-centric company (except on our servers). Ok… I take that back… the IT department is very Microsoft-centric. We use Microsoft Exchange for our email, calendaring, etc… the buzz word is collaboration application.

Evolution is the Microsoft Outlook replacement for Linux, and on my machine, it is constantly crashing. I’m sure it works great when it’s not trying to connect to a Exchange server, but dangit… I’m getting pretty frustrated with it. It doesn’t just crash the email client either. Because Evolution uses a backend (evolution-data-storage) that runs a lot of stuff in Gnome (including the calendar applet in the panel), when that backend crashes, it freezes up my entire panel (task switcher for you windows users).

Today, after a complete inability to check my email, I finally gave up and switched to Thunderbird. It connects to Exchange through IMAP, so it’s by far not the best solution. With Thunderbird, I can’t do any calendaring (meetings, appointments, etc), nor can I do any serious collaboration (assigned taskes, shared notes/memos, etc). It’s just email. But hey… I can actually check my email. It’s relatively responsive and I can actually get some work done (unlike with Evolution).

So here’s the reason why this is a pet peeve against SUSE. A co-worker is a fan of Ubuntu, a different “flavor” of linux. The latest version of Ubuntu uses Gnome 2.14 (which is the most recent stable version of Gnome), and he doesn’t have any problems. So why can’t SUSE have Gnome 2.14? It’s not like it’s bleeding edge technology. It’s been out since January and SUSE 10.1 came out in June or July. So it was released at the beginning of the SUSE release cycle.
So I may try out Ubuntu in the next couple days at work… we will see what happens. I may become a Ubuntu fan after these many years of SUSE.
Ok… I’m done now.

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