Time is money, as goes an old saying, therefore you need to manage it very well. This then calls for proper planning of your daily schedule, future events, appointments, and several other daily activities.
But you can’t keep all your plans in mind, I guess no, at least a few but not all. So you need to have certain things around you to always keep reminding you of what you want to do, the people you are hoping to meet, events you plan to attend and many more.
You can only achieve this efficiently and flexibly by using a calendar application, especially on your Linux desktop. In this article, we shall walk through a brief review of some of the best calendar applications that can help us plan and manage our daily lives.
1. Korganizer
KOrganizer is a constituent of the powerful Kontact integrated information manager on KDE desktop, for purpose of calendar and scheduling. It comprehensively features rich, some of its notable features include:
- Supports multiple calendars and todo lists
- Supports attachment of events and todos
- Quick event and todo entry
- Undo and redo functions
- Alarm notifications
- Todo integration with agenda view
- Plugin for Jewish calendar dates
- Kontact integration
- Highly customizable
- Supports web export plus so much more
Visit Homepage: https://userbase.kde.org/KOrganizer
2. Evolution
Evolution is a comprehensive personal information management software for the GNOME desktop. Its components include a calendar and address book plus a mail client. It can also work on several other desktop environments including Cinnamon, MATE, and KDE.
As an integrated software, it comes with several remarkable features, but for calendar functionality, it offers the following features:
- Allows adding, editing and deleting of appointments
- Supports customization of calendar layout
- Supports reminders for appointments and events
- Enables sorting and organizing of calendars
- Supports sending of invitations by email
- Supports sharing of calendar information
- Enables classification of appointments and vital tasks on groupware servers
Visit Homepage: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evolution
3. California
California is a simple, modern and relatively new calendar app for the GNOME 3 desktop environment. It enables users to easily handle their online calendars with a modern user interface.
Being a new application, it has yet a handful of features and these include:
- Built on the Evolution Data Server (EDS) for all backend calendar functionality
- Simple to setup
- Quick and easy to use
- Modern GUI
Visit Homepage: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/California
4. Day Planner
Day planner is a free and open-source calendar app developed for Linux users to easily plan and manage their time, in terms of handling appointments, events and so much more.
It also offers some brilliant features and these are:
- Displays remainders
- Intuitive GUI
- Simple to use
- Available in several international languages
- Includes a separate synchronization server, therefore, users can synchronize a day planner from any location
Visit Homepage: http://www.day-planner.org
5. Lightning (Thunderbird Extension)
Lightning is an extension for the popular Mozilla Thunderbird email client, it enables users to easily organize their schedule and events. You can download it from the Mozilla website or search for it under Thunderbird extensions and install it.
Its features include:
- Supports multiple calendars
- Enables users to create todo lists
- Supports entry for events
- It also enables users to subscribe to public calendars and many more.
Visit Homepage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/
6. Calcurse
Calcurse is a simple yet powerful text-based calendar and organizer that you can also use on Linux, especially if you spend a great deal of your time on the command line.
It enables users to keep track of all daily activities that they want to perform, plans, appointments and future events that they want to accomplish, fulfill and attend.
It offers some great and remarkable features and these include:
- Configurable notification system as a reminder of future events, capable of sending mails and beyond
- Highly customizable curses interface to meet a user’s needs
- Supports numerous kinds of appointments and todos
- Highly configurable key bindings
- Support for importing iCalender format files
- Support for UTF-8
- Support for exporting to several formats including iCalender and pcal
- Offers an impressive non-interactive command line that supports scripts
- Also supports running scripts while loading or saving data plus many more
Visit Homepage: http://calcurse.org
7. Osmo
Osmo is a GTK based personal organizer that comes with a calendar, tasks manager, date calculator, address book and notes modules. It was designed to be a lightweight, easy to use and perfect looking PIM tool that will help you to manage personal information in a plain XML database.
In this brief review, we covered some of the best calendar apps that you can install on your Linux desktop to help you efficiently plan and manage your daily schedule and events, plus so much more in relation to time management.
Is there any calendar app with some remarkable components missing in the list above, then give us feedback through the comment section below.
What, no mention of Orage Calendar? It beats out all of the above. It is small, can sit on your desktop and has easy to use reminders and notifications. I wouldn’t be without it. Often, I will remove the default calendar that comes with an OS and replace it with Orage Calendar. One of the best.
@Friar,
Thanks for notifying about Orage Calendar application, we will include in the list..
My wife uses Orage Calender like a demon. We both use Xubuntu on our desktop and laptop computers, but I use Calcurse as my main calendar, because it just works better for me.
A calendar should not only be useful for planning and remembering future appointments but also to keep track of old appointments. For the diary function of the calendar, it should be possible to edit the text of expired appointments.
This is possible in Logenda. That program also has a function to search in appointments. Its scrollable calendar display gives an easy survey of a complete calendar year.
LoGenda is a program for PC Linux (Ubuntu).
@Nelly
Many thanks for the useful feedback and for sharing LoGenda. We’ll check it out.
I know this will go against what us Linux users would ever recommend but it’s such a good calendar I have to mention it. Microsoft Calendar. I use both it and Google Calendar.
Microsoft Calendar for work-related and Google for my personal, or non-work-related. WebCatalog was used to create desktop apps of each and both are fantastic.
It’s spelled “calendar” with an “A” in calendAr not calendEr.
just a quick search and replace and your article will be spotless !
Thanks!
@Julius
Many thanks for the heads up, we have updated the article with the correct spelling.
MineTime is a new, modern and multi-platform calendar app. Connects to many calendars providers. https://minetime.ai
(Disclaimer: I am one of the developers)
@Marco
Many thanks for sharing this with us, we’ll check it out and review it as well.
I would like to know which of these programs supports CalDAV (or connects with Google Calendar).
@Daniel
Lightning (Thunderbird Extension), Evolution, Korganizer and California all support CalDav and should support Google Calender.
Thank you so much!
“calcurse” is so fantastic!
How about something like Plan? Looks like a simple but functional calendar app with a terrific bird’s eye view of monthly appts/notes. I’m searching high and low for this kind of calendar view – where you see the entire month in full screen and events/journal entries/etc can be gleaned. It’s writen in X/Motif and pretty old though..
https://www.bitrot.de/plan.html
California also has the same, full-screen view but this thing has been in development for years now and it’s still considered “new”. By the time they’re done, it’ll be as feature-bloated as everything else.
@derrick
We shall definitely try it out and possibly review it here as well. Thanks for getting back.
I use Google the Calendar but with the Korganizer
That is a good option, we shell have to try it out and see how it works. Thanks for the feedback.
You forgot my favorite calendar application… calcurse! I’ve been using it for years now, and can’t live without it!
@Howard,
Actually we haven’t forgot, fact is we really don’t know about the calcurse tool, but thanks for suggesting, we will include to the list..
@Howard,
As per your suggestion, we’ve included your favorite calender application called ‘Calcurse’ to the list, hope you like it..