![]() ![]() As long as you set your user agent correctly (see previous paragraph), it works flawlessly.įat client users should look at Evolution’s calendaring capabilities. My preferred method is to use OWA to manage calendaring. Getting calendaring right with Exchange seems to be more difficult than email. You’ll get the rich OWA interface that makes things much easier. Add a user agent spoofing extension to Chrome and masquerade as Chrome on Windows or Mac. ![]() Beware that OWA detects Chrome on Linux and presents you with the awful “light” interface for OWA. If you’re not eager to mess with a fat client, just use Outlook Web Access in your favorite browser. Evolution’s UI was too clunky for me to use and it seemed to have significant lags when fetching email. The performance could be better, but it seems to perform slightly better than using Davmail. There are still some bugs and missing features, especially around starring/flagging emails. The latest release of Evolution for GNOME has an exchange-ews connector that works relatively well with newer versions of Exchange. One downside is that Davmail can become a bit CPU-hungry at times and may drag down a battery on a laptop. Point Davmail to your OWA server and then configure Thunderbird to talk to Davmail. Davmail is a translation layer that handles the Exchange connectivity (via OWA/EWS) and it serves up POP, IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, and CalDav to applications on your machine. My preferred method is to use Thunderbird and Davmail. XFCE is good if you’re on older hardware or if you prefer something very lightweight.Įxchange can even be a challenge on Windows, so don’t expect a cakewalk in Linux. Cinnamon is a good alternative if you really enjoy GNOME applications. GNOME 3 has an interface that just doesn’t make sense to me, but GNOME 3’s new classic mode shows a lot of potential. KDE makes sense for me because it’s feature-rich and the Qt-based applications are well-designed. Some folks prefer Kubuntu (Ubuntu’s KDE release) or Linux Mint’s KDE release, but I’m a bit biased towards Fedora as I enjoy RPM/yum and I’m involved in the Fedora community. It feels awkward at first but it’s extremely quick and accurate once you get it right. I’m able to hold the left mouse button with my left hand while using the touchpad with my right. As a Mac user, I sometimes find myself highlighting the wrong piece of text or rolling backwards and forwards to get the right selection. One of my favorite parts of the Thinkpad is the mouse buttons above the trackpad. That can be fixed but I’m too lazy to go down that road at the moment. The only hangup is the fingerprint reader (due to proprietary firmware). One nice benefit is that almost every piece of hardware is recognized within Linux. There’s no ethernet adapter, but you can pick up a USB 2.0 Gigabit adapter for $25 or less. Extra displays are connected with mini-DisplayPort and that allows me to use the Mac DisplayPort dongles that I find laying around all over the place. It has a decent screen, a fantastic keyboard, good battery life, and it’s very light. If you’re eager to make the same change, here’s the workflow I’m using: I’m hoping that the move is permanent, but time will tell. In an effort to free up my time at work for the important stuff, I’m moving to Linux. Reducing clutter has saved me a ton of time.” When I asked why he stuck with Linux, he smiled and responded quickly: “When I use Linux, I feel like I can do my work without being bothered. While at this year’s Red Hat Summit, I saw someone using Linux on a laptop and I asked: “How do you survive on Linux at your office?” He confided that his office is extremely Windows-centric and that it was tough to overcome in the beginning. The Mac was working well for me, but as each release passed, it seems like more things were out of my control and I was constantly notified of something that my computer wanted me to do. I moved away from the iPhone to Android last year because the Android gave me finer-grained controls over my phone and allowed me to troubleshoot my own problems. My main goal for switching to Linux is to reduce clutter. I can’t make any sense out of Windows 8, but I’ve heard some positive things about it on tablets. Windows 7 has been a solid performer for me and OS X has an amazing UI (and a vibrant community around it). Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a Windows or Mac basher. I decided to make a change after using a Mac at Rackspace for six years. Integrating with Active Directory, wrangling email with Microsoft Exchange, and taming quirky Microsoft office documents can be a challenge even with a well-equipped Mac. The thought of using Linux as a manager in a highly Windows- and Mac-centric corporate environment isn’t something to be taken lightly.
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