Synchronizing: How do you sync / synchronize Calendar and Contacts with your desktop?
04-20-2021, 09:10 AM
Oh well ... what a topic. Doing all this with a fully fledged desktop is easy, but along comes the Pinephone with its mobile user interface ...
I found it rather difficult to set up a remote calendar with Mobian. I learnt that in a Gnome environment, you use Evolution to set up such an account, but it completely failed to create an ActiveSync account, with error messages that float around the internet for years, but there seems to be no progress in that area -- these projects are all lacking manpower unfortunately. I managed to connect a CardDAV and a CalDAV account with Evolution, though, and had a hard time deactivating a lot of calendars and address books that had been shared with me previously and should not be synced to my phone. But in the end, lo and behold, I got a two-way sync for calendar and addressbook (though I must admit that I to this date only changed the addressbook on the phone).
One drawback of the Gnome calendaring backend seems to be incomplete handling of event exceptions. I previously had a phone with a kcalcore backend, and while it wasn't complete as well, it improved a lot over time and finally was perfectly usable for me. A solution could be to not use exceptions to events, but to create them one by one as separate events instead of series. Another solution could be helping to improve the software itself, obviously.
There is a multitude of things to nit-pick about in conjunction with this topic, but hey, this is a Linux phone ;-) (and ultimately, you could to something about it yourself).
So, in essence: it's working here, sort of. YMMV.
I found it rather difficult to set up a remote calendar with Mobian. I learnt that in a Gnome environment, you use Evolution to set up such an account, but it completely failed to create an ActiveSync account, with error messages that float around the internet for years, but there seems to be no progress in that area -- these projects are all lacking manpower unfortunately. I managed to connect a CardDAV and a CalDAV account with Evolution, though, and had a hard time deactivating a lot of calendars and address books that had been shared with me previously and should not be synced to my phone. But in the end, lo and behold, I got a two-way sync for calendar and addressbook (though I must admit that I to this date only changed the addressbook on the phone).
One drawback of the Gnome calendaring backend seems to be incomplete handling of event exceptions. I previously had a phone with a kcalcore backend, and while it wasn't complete as well, it improved a lot over time and finally was perfectly usable for me. A solution could be to not use exceptions to events, but to create them one by one as separate events instead of series. Another solution could be helping to improve the software itself, obviously.
There is a multitude of things to nit-pick about in conjunction with this topic, but hey, this is a Linux phone ;-) (and ultimately, you could to something about it yourself).
So, in essence: it's working here, sort of. YMMV.