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Thunderbird Unseats Evolution In Ubuntu 11.10

Posted by Unknown on from the outlook-clones-no-longer-cool dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Coinciding with the recent release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5 and its 400 performance and stability fixes, Canonical has decided that it's now fit for adoption in Ubuntu — and as of version 11.10, Thunderbird will replace Evolution as the default mail program. You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl."

15 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. BFT by cadeon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've always hated evolution. Thunderbird is much cleaner.

    1. Re:BFT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I've always hated evolution. Thunderbird is much cleaner.

      Look, can you religious nut-jobs take your "intelligent design" and thunder throwing sky gods elsewhere? Evolution is a well founded scientific...

      What? Email programs?
      *Ahem* Sorry for the interruption, carry on.

    2. Re:BFT by poetmatt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      absolutely. I also agree with the commenter below, get rid of empathy and go back to pidgin, and then we'll be a step closer to ubuntu not being crap.

    3. Re:BFT by cadeon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because, Evolution has been a part of the default GNOME suite for a very long time, so as more functionality was built, developers could assume Evolution was there.

      Oops.

    4. Re:BFT by supersloshy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Pidgin has a lot more features than Empathy does, that's for sure, but when GNOME 3 came out I decided to make the switch... and I'm really liking it so far. Aside from not supporting blocking contacts on every protocol that Pidgin does (I think it only supports one or two protocols right now for that), it does just enough for me and it feels easier to use than Pidgin, in addition to having great GNOME 3 integration. As far as Ubuntu goes, they'd be better off using Pidgin, but every other distro, as in the GNOME 3 using ones, are much better off with Empathy in the long run. It's very pleasant to use, even if it is lacking in a few parts.

      --
      "Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
    5. Re:BFT by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Informative

      That suggests they have some stringent standards, especially considering the number of people who have been using Thunderbird for years without issue.

      What really happened is they noticed the number of people who removed evolution and installed thunderbird every time they installed a new version of Ubuntu. Eventually, numbers mean something.

  2. Evolution by geek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never liked Evolution. It tried too hard to be Outlook. It was just as convoluted to configure, was buggy as sin and used an enormous amount of screen real estate. Thunderbird has it's issues here also but it's been far better than Evolution for some time now. I'm probably not the target audience anymore though, I've been using webmail for some time and have no intentions of switching back to a client.

    1. Re:Evolution by gfxguy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Because people use email to arrange and invite many people to meetings. I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice. Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway? Anyway, lightening is then linked to one of my Google calendars anyway, so no matter where I go I can check my schedule. So... anyway, I can see why you might not like it, but "never understood?" It actually makes perfect sense. And this isn't evolution or outlook... even with lightening add-on, thunderbird starts up quickly and is still relatively lightweight by comparison.

      --
      Stupid sexy Flanders.
  3. About time by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I like "close to how I set things up anyway", so that I don't have to fight against stupid defaults all the time. Purge evolution, purge empathy, install thunderbird, install pidgin. Done. That was the appeal of Ubuntu.

    Though they've jumped the shark with unity, so ... I'll switch to Debian now I guess.

  4. Download by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Funny

    You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl.

    Wow, you have to download and install an entire OS distribution to try an email client.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
  5. Exchange connectivity? by dousette · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How does Thunderbird 5 handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Evolution.

  6. Addressbook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm really surprised they're doing this before they fix Thunderbird's Addressbook. How they still have not implemented allowing as many email addresses as you want to add for a person is beyond me.

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118665

    1. Re:Addressbook by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3

      And along those lines, I wish they'd decouple message preferences from the address book. For example, I get a sales newsletter from an online computer parts retailer we all know and love, and the only way to tell Thunderbird to always display the images from that sender is to add them to my address book and set an option there. Why, oh why? Thunderbird already uses SQLite for other stuff, so why can't it have a table like showimages (address varchar, show boolean) instead of making me litter my contact database?

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  7. Re:Anachronistic much? by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative

    And Apple has finally introduced downloadable apps to its core OS, like Debian's had since 1999 via apt. But we're still waiting for delta updates to those apps, like Fedora has supported for years via delta RPM.

    Plenty of anachronisms to go around.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  8. Re:Cross platform helps. by glwtta · · Score: 3, Funny

    I have yet to see a windows version of Evolution.

    It's been around for a while: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi