Much of the time when I write about the evolution of Linux or the evolution of the client, I get lots of comments revolving around the lack of popular games for Linux or whether the GIMP can replace Photoshop. And, of course, the partisans for whom it's important whether Linux "wins" or "loses" to Windows or Mac OS X jump in with their various ideological objectives.

Roelof Temmingh has written a cool new application which provides individuals with the ability to do data mining of publicly available information. It's a cross-platform Java application called Evolution, currently in its second beta, and available as a free download.

One thing that keeps Linux in the back foot is the lack of good quality applications that can compete with the best out there. The advent of paid softwares section in Ubuntu Software Center is a start, things like that can kick start application development for Linux in a big way. But things were not as bad I thought it would be.

While I've known about the free, open-source desktop publishing application Scribus, until I happened across this article today I didn't know that Scribus is a cross-platform program that runs not just in Linux/Unix but also on computers using the Macintosh OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. That raises my opinion of Scribus immediately.

The Evolution mail client has been the default such application in Ubuntu since I got to know of Linux. Sure it is the default GNOME mail/calendar application, but I really am of the view that Ubuntu needs to drop it in favor of say Mozilla's very brilliant Thunderbird.

Recently I’ve noticed an increases in the number of people I know who are migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Either my tireless advocacy is grinding them down, word is starting to spread. Perhaps they’ve actually seen Vista in action and decided to jump ship now. Either way there are some things they are going to miss when they make the leap.

I've used Evolution, the default email client in Ubuntu, for a couple of years to manage numerous mail accounts.  In general, I think it's a great application.  But as with everything in life, there's always room for improvement.  Below, I consider the most chronically frustrating and poorly designed aspects of Evolution, and how they could be fixed.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird for years now and found it the best email client available. Well, at least from the ones I knew. And Incredimail isn’t such a good competitor. ;)

But I did miss something. Some things just didn’t go really smooth and I wanted to integrate it more with GNOME.

A Personal Information Management (PIM) suite is supposedly a single application that gives you your email, contacts, calendar and other important information. Bringing Mail, Contacts, Calendar and more into one application is something that many find useful.