I use Thunderbird. I find that without using a ton of plugins I can not get Thunderbird to do remotely close to what Outlook does out of the box. Truth be told the Microsoft Office suite is a really good suite of products, especially Outlook and it's integration with Word.

I hate how is Thunderbird you have to have a plugin to have a calendar, and then being able to schedule appointments with people is a whole other project. Also if you Forward an email it just creates a new email with the forwarding email attached as a .eml file. When that happens you get into compatibility of the recipient being able to read it (mainly web mail users). It is little things like that I get worked up about, but I have found Thunderbird is the closest open source client to outlook to manage my mail.

Does anyone disagree? If so what do you recommend? I personally would like to find a client more like Microsoft Outlook that I can run natively on Debian.

http://email.about.com/od/linuxemail...ents-fo---.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...e-mail_clients
http://www.zimbra.com/ - runs on Linux, acts like Outlook

Evolution is probably going to be close, but I've been pleased with Kmail.

And instead of hating Thunderbird for having to have plugins, remember that it's a MAIL client...having it do a calendar, scheduler, etc., is outside of it's scope. It was designed to do just mail...the fact that you CAN extend it as you wish is better than Outlook right off the bat. Outlook was designed for something different.

MS Office suite is *not* a really good suite of products. Lots of bloat, useless features, and it really only works well with other MS products. OpenOffice and/or Koffice suite duplicates probably 98% of MS, but it's different. If you want it to work with your mail client (whatever you pick), it can. You don't get that with Outlook/MS.

If you're moving to a new platform, the best advice I can give is to let go of what WAS...move on to what IS. You're free now...YOU get to decide what you use, how you want it, and how it interoperates. Up to now, MS TOLD you how it would work....

TBone
Well I personally disagree with you TBone. I understand Thunderbird is a MAIL program only. You can use plugins to extended it, however it requires other packages in most cases. Evolution is a great roduct if your use Gnome. I personally use KDE. In order for my to install Evolution I have to install Gnome and give up Rhythmbox which I use. So right off Evolution is a conflict for me. I like Outlook personally as it is a full office organizer In my opinion. I can run 1 app and have 90% of what I need to manage my day. I can view my calendar, schedule with others, manage my Task list of things, Manage my contacts, etc. all from 1 location. How is that not a great product?

As far as the core of the office suite (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) OOo and KOffice are great. However where is a comparable package to One Note, Visio, and Project? I miss not having Visio, I use the tar out out of that package. For not I have a Windows VM for things like Visio is I truely need them. Now days since I am working at home for myself I haven't used it much, but when I was in corporate America I was using it daily.

Chris
I checked out Zimbra. That is made by Yahoo. I couldn't get it to run. Maybe it was because I ran the installer as root. I will try it again. That looked like a promising product.

You may have readthis right up there but you really have to know this :
1 - THUNDERBIRD is mail client. That's its primary goal and it's much efficient on that, all the rest is skinny trolls
2 - M$ PROPAGANDA is what I see in your post. M$ products _only_ integrate great one with another. Not more not less. Boys just manage to deliver bloated stuff. Have you ever experienced attached tnef files and such ? well those are another example of the culture of insanity built up by microsoft in IT in general...
I don't feel concerned people putting money in M$ products but I'm quite bored people dare complain/whining after free software for not being like ...

I've used Zimbra at a company I used to work for (strictly FOSS) and it seemed to do same as Outlook etc, inc calendaring/scheduling etc, but I'm no mail expert.

kontact (on KDE3 anyway) seems to do much of what you want: Integrated

• Summary
• Email (Multiple Mailboxes, filtering of incoming mail, actions on incoming mail (eg Run a script) Etc
• Contacts (address book, Distribution lists Etc)
• Calendar (Appointments, to-dos)
• To-Do
• Journal (Like a diary)
• Notes
• RSS- Feeds

It reminded me too much of M$, so I just use the kmail bit and ignore the rest.

I expect there's something similar for KDE4

Evolution runs just fine under KDE, and under any other desktop environment you'd care to run. I ran it under KDE 3.x, and 4.x, before giving it up for Kmail. And as tredegar pointed out, kontact is one that works great too.
OpenOffice Impress does PowerPoint quite well, and is already in the Oo suite.
Dia, ArgoUML, and Kivio are good Visio replacement programs. Even OpenOffice Draw can crank out simple flowcharts easily.
As far as One-Note goes, there are MANY group collaboration products out there than handle what One Note does.

And again, as others have said, MS products only integrate well with each other. Try getting One Note to function in an environment where you have a Mac or Samba user, or with someone who uses something OTHER than MS products.

You're comparing apples to oranges. If you're convinced that MS products are the way to go, and your productivity is suffering, then you should go back to MS. Otherwise, look at your new tool set, find out what works for you, and adjust.

The biggest problem I have with Evolution is that it seems VERY slow (as in up to 10-15 *minutes* just to open the inbox and then 2-5 minutes to load and read any message), and crashes often. At work we're an Exchange shop (not my choice), and make extensive use of mail, calendars, and contacts from that. I need to be able to access the Exchange server. I've been getting by using Mulberry (a now-open-source IMAP client) for mail, but when I need to update my calendar I have to remote desktop to something or have a Windows machine with Outlook. And, keeping the global access book updated is a bit of a chore since it's not integrated. I've tried Thunderbird, which I use for my personal account, but since, for security reasons, the Exchange admin has authentication set to require NTLM, I can't get that to work (at least Thunderbird on Linux). And don't even suggest Outlook Web Access, that's pitiful under Exchange 2003, less pitiful under Exchange 2007 which we aren't on yet, and might possibly work in Exchange 2010 which we'll move to "sometime this year we hope".

I am using the version of Evolution that comes with Ubuntu Karmic (9.10), so I'm sure that's not the latest and greatest. Building Evolution from source, which I tried at one point, is quite involved, but I'd be willing to go there if I was pretty sure it would fix all the slowness and crashes I've had. I would love to be able to not need to get on a Windows box every time I have to update my work calendar!