When comparing California vs MineTime, the Slant community recommends MineTime for most people. In the question“What are the best calendar apps for Linux?” MineTime is ranked 6th while California is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose MineTime is:
Connecting to service accounts (such as Exchange) is easy and straightforward.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Integrates with the desktop in order to provide notifications
California offers desktop notification on most major DEs in Linux, which is great to know when events are happening while not having to have the app open in the foreground.
Pro Events can be added using natural language
The application allows natural language input for events. For example, typing in "Lunch with Stuart Kearney at 2pm" will set the appointment.
Pro Easy to setup
Connecting to service accounts (such as Exchange) is easy and straightforward.
Pro Provides analytics tools
You can visually see how often you met any person in your calendar in the last months.
Pro Google synchronization
Connects to your Google accounts via OAuth.
Pro Great user interface
Visually this is a nice application to look at and use.
Pro Supports Exchange calendars
You can connect multiple Exchange, Outlook or Office 365 accounts. Credentials only stored locally.
Pro NLP for event creation
Use Natural Language (English) to add events quickly. For example, "Meeting with John tomorrow at 11"
Pro Beta support for iCloud accounts
This feature for iCloud account and generic CalDAV calendars is now in the beta stage.
Cons
Con Currently not in active development
Yorba, the group that developed California, is no longer actively developing software.
While Geary (Yorba's mail client) has been adopted by the elementary teams as "Pantheon Mail", both elementary and Gnome have their own calendar projects and it is unlikely that either of them will contribute to California in the future.
That being said, California uses evolution data server for all backend/sync/storage related tasks, which should hopefully make it possible to use it even if 3rd party vendors change their APIs/protocols etc. As long as EDS does not introduce backwards incompatible changes or any major California bugs occur (it has been working fine for me so far), the current state of California should remain usable for quite a while.
Con Currently no drag and drop support
There is no way to drag events in the app for easy switching, it all has to be done manually which can be a lot of work to move many things around.
Con Closed source
