I am seriously thinking of moving back to using Linux as my main desktop. The one thing I really need is access to my outlook.com data.
That is:
Email (no problem with IMAP)
Contacts
Calendars
OneDrive documents
I’ve heard that OneDrive is available. But what I really want/need is an equivalent to Outlook that can combine all my Outlook data - email, contacts and calendars, preferably in one application. Evolution or Kontakt would seem the ideal candidates, but neither seems to be able to get anything other than email from outlook.com.
I tried Gnome cloud accounts, but, while it supports Microsoft accounts, it only does email and files.
Is there a way around it, or is the only option webmail?
The point would be to get away from Windows. I already have a few Linux servers kicking around, but I’ve not found a solution to using a Microsoft account under Linux. Ideally, I’d eventually move away from the Microsoft account to something self-hosted, but I’d need access to the contacts and calendar until I’d sorted out an alternative.
Well duh, I understood your desire, but as you clearly stated you can’t make it yet, so I was proposing a work-around that could work in the near term. The only other suggestion I have for you is to see if the email system operated by the company that makes Proxmox would be workable: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-mail-gateway
Found this mail client that says it will do calendars also, https://getmailspring.com/
Found a how-to for OneDrive on Linux: https://itsfoss.com/use-onedrive-on-linux/ but it uses non-free software. The comments have some recommendations for other programs to connect to OneDrive.
Do you use Microsoft 365? I use all the apps on my linux laptop in a browser. From outlook to powerpoint, they all work and flow well and almost feel like native apps. They do have a lot of whitespace so if you like a dense layout you might not like it, but i have been impressed with how well they all work as web apps.
I use Microsoft 365 and I use the applications heavily. I have used Outlook since 1997 and I find the browser clumsy and irritating, plus it only lets you use the one account, I have many accounts attached to Outlook on the desktop. I could use the non-Microsoft accounts with Kontakt or Evolution etc. but I want a 1-stop-shop for email, contacts, calendar and notes that are synced with my Microsoft account.
Sadly, this is precisely what drew me back towards Windows coming from Linux. I find that if you’re sold on the desktop Office experience, Windows will kind of come with that, kicking and screaming.
Why do you want to go Linux on your desktop? Necessity, main machine desktop use curiosity, or idealism? For necessity, I’d VM Linux on Windows. For curiosity, too. For idealism… I suppose idealism only truly works when a bit painful. But if it’s truly the latter, the way might be to unshackle from Office and go free there, too. Except for a VM back as @PHolder suggested. I tried that (but sadly ended up in kind of a jumble of both worlds with bogged me down to no end).
In the end, making an educated guess as to which system stands less in the way of working productively should win the battle for a desktop. For me, turned out to be Seattle’s finest.
Because I want to get away from using Windows. I was a Linux user from 2002 through 2007, but then went back to Windows via MacOS X. I used Linux for nearly everything, apart from games, I was even a tester for SUSE for a while. But I had to exchange collaborative documents with Microsoft Office users a lot and it just wasn’t worth the hassle. OO.o and Libre Office are fine, if you are working in isolation, but if you have to exchange documents with an MS Office client, they are a non-starter. I’d work on a document in OO.o, then have to vet it on a Windows PC I kept in the corner, spend an hour or so repaginating and reformatting, so that it looked like it should, then send it out.
That became to much faff, so I went back to using Windows full time when Vista came out.
My experiment in April failed, because the Bluetooth wasn’t reliable and the nVidia graphics drivers weren’t reliable (my BT keyboard would cut out mid-sentence for a couple of seconds, then restart as if nothing had happened) and the nVidia graphics card would hard-crash the system every 8 - 10 wake-ups from sleep mode.
Unfortunately, as much as I love Linux, and have used it in VMs for over a decade, Windows “just works” on most hardware.
Yeah, makes perfect and sobering sense - and reminds me of our discussion on the subject couple of months back. We seem to be experiencing the same conundrum: Windows fatigue and Linux imperfections.
The sad part of it is that while a) Linux has gotten so extremely far on a shoestring that you want to use and love it on the desktop, too, and b) Windows, even though extremely profitable, still suffers from some seemingly insurmountable UI, privacy, updating, transparency, and choice issues, the result still remains that I end up choosing Windows. Must be a curious form of masochism.
I wonder if Microsoft is bound for making Windows sort-of-libre with its move from offering Software towards offering services. WSL is one sign, the idea of Microsoft wanting to be everywhere and not just Windows another. A brave new world in which Windows is a user-respecting and well-working desktop environment and compatibilty layer for any Linux would be bliss.
I use Linux as my main desktop at work. But given we are changing to a Microsoft 365 shop with Active directory, I have a Windows 10 VM for Active Directory administration. Since as a support person, I dislike local mail clients, I use the Office Web Apps as much as possible. Microsoft has a nice Teams app on Ubuntu, so it’s totally doable for me to live on my prefered Linux OS (MAC at home), and still have Teams and browser access to a lot of the administration and apps. Do what you like and what works. It’s all good.
Users on Web based apps - “How do I do this”?
Users on Local mail clients - “Why isn’t this working”?
You specifically mean outlook.com and not O365, correct? I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve read that evolution-ews should be able to support it (hence, the name EWS). You need to use the Legacy Auth, that is an app-password, and it’s done after reverse-engineering the protocol, but I wonder if it could work for you.
Edit:
Here’s a guide how to do it for your O365 accounts using the modern authentication:
But if it’s truly the latter, the way might be to unshackle from Office and go free there, too. Except for a VM back as