Thunderbird Unseats Evolution In Ubuntu 11.10 283
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."
Evolution (Score:5, 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.
Exchange connectivity? (Score:3, Interesting)
Addressbook (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
Setup Wizard (Score:2, Interesting)
And they STILL haven't fixed the setup wizard. I've said the same thing with every release since thunderbird 3: the setup process needs a way to completely BYPASS the wizard, BEFORE the wizard starts spinning out of control. Not after, not during, but BEFORE.
It's not rocket science. The very first thing you do, before committing any changes, is prompt the user: "Would you like to use the account setup wizard, or would you like to setup your account manually?" For christ's sake, it's going to take all of 5 minutes to implement this.
I don't need or want an "improved" wizard. I need a way to bypass it, cleanly and without a trace. (And I say "without a trace" because even if you manage to stop the wizard, the first server address it pulls out of its ass, however wrong it may be, will be the chosen name of your new account and account folder.) The only thing worse than making assumptions about how the user intends to use the program is forcing the user to follow those assumptions. PLEASE, don't do it.
Re:BFT (Score:4, 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.