Era is a new Rust-based calendar app for GNOME that describes itself as “beautiful and performant”.
And you don’t need to schedule a date to try it; a beta release is available to install from Flathub.
At first glance, Era looks like GNOME’s Calendar (which got a big update in the GNOME 51, notably in ways you feel rather than see). But then, how could it not? There are only so many ways to arrange a grid of numbers in boxes with room for coloured event labels.
Functionally, Era covers the same ground: you can browse dates, add, edit and search events and sync with various online providers. You can switch between dedicated Year, Month and Agenda views, and toggle a sidebar which lets you manage calendars.
The event editor also shows all the fields and settings you’d expect, letting you give events a name, dial in the exact time/duration, choose whether it repeats or is a one off and, helpfully, set a location or conference venue
The GTK4/libadwaita UI is very clean, highly adaptive and text-books GNOME-looking. It’d be easy to mistake it for a core app. Overlay buttons on the main calendar view when the window is wide are nice, and I like how usable the UI remains at smaller widths.
The backend is interesting too.
Era uses Evolution Data Server (EDS), like GNOME Calendar, but it doesn’t connect to EDS directly. Instead, it routes calls through a middle-layer called Clepsydre. This approaches allows backends to be hot-swappable (useful if the app is ported to, say, Android).
You can use it locally, import .ics or sync to supported providers.
Worth using?
As this is in beta I’ll stash the groan-worthy posit asking if it ‘marks a new era for calendar apps’ on Linux since, quite honestly, calendars are rarely the most exciting things in general (not unless each month shows a different guinea pig sat in a small baskets, etc).
It’s not the only new Linux calendar app in the mix. Linux Mint has made a new calendar app under its XApps project banner and it already looks capable.
But Era is is encouraging, and available to test – the Flathub description states the app “grows with you” and, based on my own first impressions, I’d be keen to see it do just that.
Get Era on Flathub