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I love Gnome 3, but I hate the Evolution Mail Client it ships with. Thunderbird (+Lightning Extension) is superior to it in any way. In fact, Evolution is pretty much the Outlook Express of the Linux World.

However, Gnome 3 has this really nice calendar view when you click on the Clock in the Top Bar, but it pulls it’s calendar data from Evolution and there’s no easy option to get the data from Thunderbird, which I personally prefer. There’s an addon for Thunderbird called “evolution-mirror” which is supposed to sync the data, but it doesn’t seem to work with Evolution 3 anymore.

Another way to accomplish the sync is this:

First we publish the Thunderbird Calendar to a local file.

As you can see I put my Calendars into a hidden directory here, but you can really put them anywhere. After this is done, it’s time to launch Evolution. Add a new local calendar and select the file you just exported your calendar into.

Note the “On file change” option here, so it automatically refreshes when the calendar updates.

The downside of this method is that every time you update your calendar in Thunderbird you need to publish it again. However, Evolution picks up the updated calendar automatically, so that part works on it’s own. And there we go, having all our calendar date in the Gnome Top Bar.

Edit: In the comments there’s a method to “auto publish” calendars using an extension.