Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.
The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.
The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.
So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.
There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.
Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.
I wouldn’t call Thunderbird “decent”, I’d call it nominally functional.
Performance is terrible, lots of lags, etc. And this on a fairly new, recently rebuilt, 16gb Windows LTSC laptop (so no bloat).
And then there’s the UI stuff - monochromatic so hard to tell where one window/tab starts/ends, etc.
Windows LTSC laptop (so no bloat)
Well, apart from the Windows part (hehe)
Outlook is pretty good, and exchange does a decent job of making calendars available on mobile, web, or desktop client.
The outlook web app is the expected future.
Does it not work well with other calendar servers?
The new Outlook (essentially Outlook on the web wrapped in an app framework) is very good indeed. I use it to aggregate my works 365 calendar with my multiple Google and Apple accounts.
Outlook is garbage. Everything Microsoft does is garbage and consumer hostile, except for visual studio code. Anyone who’s used Google business apps knows this. Teams is such an unproductive joke I refuse to work for any company that uses it. It’s evidence a company is cheap and values cost cutting more than efficiency.
I had a family 365 account to backup my parent’s shit. Even though their PC’s were logged into their fucking Microsoft accounts, and backed up to OneDrive, Outlook displayed ads and couldn’t be linked to their subscription without changing their account emails. Ads were also re-inserted into their OS, even though I already ran multiple scripts to disable them all previously. Complete joke. Cancelled that shit.
except for visual studio code
But also:
- Telemetry everywhere
- Not permitted to use the official marketplace with OSS builds
- Not able to use certain extensions (like C# debugger) with OSS builds
Though I’ve been very happy about the direction .NET and C# have been going, especially the licensing.
That’s why vscodium exists brah
What I’m saying is that Microsoft is, in fact, being hostile by limiting OSS builds such as Codium in the ways I’ve mentioned above. I guess that’s how they try to get people to keep using their proprietary build instead.
The author seems dead set on a tauri calendar implementation. I came across what is apparently a scheduling toolkit in rust:
https://github.com/fmeringdal/nettu-scheduler
Which I guess could be used to build a desktop calendar app. One flaw in the ointment is that a calendar program really needs email integration. Downloading an ICS file and manually transferring that over to your calendar app isn’t going to cut it.
Which brings us to the lack of solid calendar servers. I’ve searched but I haven’t found anything popular, OSS, easy to install, and useful for groups. Radicale exists but multi user support is a janky hack, while Nextcloud has unreliable sync. I’m looking for features like:
- reliable calendar sync
- sharable calendars.
- scheduling help - when to have a meeting?
- how many attendees for a group event, how many invited etc.
I’d much rather have Tau’ri calendar software than Goa’uld software of any kind. Who knows what kind of malicious code those snakes have snuck in there?
