I don’t mean the biological process of change that is backed up by mounds and mounds of evidence. I am talking about the program Evolution. Since version 2, it has been a total disaster of a program. I’m an advanced user of Linux, but I also don’t want to spend a lot of time futzing with the basic software components I use. In no particular order, these are my gripes:

1. IMAP support is slow. My whole box would often be pinned trying to deal with 9 IMAP accounts. Thunderbird has no such issues.
2. More than one instance of Evolution can’t work from the same IMAP server without conflicts. Thunderbird has no such issues.
3. Everytime I start Evolution 2.2 up on my Fedora Core 4 laptop, it crashes when trying to access my exchange account.
4. Trying to compile Evolution 2.4 is more trouble than it should be, and there exists no documentation that outlines a surefire way to compile it.
5. The shared/public folder handling is retarded. It used to be in pre-2.x versions, that shared/public were just browsed like normal mail folders. In the new versions, there exists this retarded method of making shared/public folders your “favorites”. Guess what? It doesn’t handle sub-folders. Idiotic.

I’ve tried compiling, I’ve tried reinstalling components, and clearing my settings, all to no avail. Evolution is now a piece of garbage software, buggier than Outlook and way, way less stable than Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been my choice of mail program for the last year, because of its stability, clean features, and overall speed. Never say never, but I don’t forsee going back to Evolution. It’s grown old and bloated.

I’m sure some die hard Evolution fans could try to convince me that “this new version fixes this and that” but who cares. I’m tired of struggling with it. You want Evolution to become a top email client? Fix the bugs, and have the interface make sense.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.