GNOME Online Accounts

Introduction

At first, the GNOME Online Accounts feature seems unassuming, but it is pretty powerful. It allows you to access your email, tasks, files in cloud storage, online calendars, and more from your desktop apps within minutes.

In this short guide, you will see how to get started.

Assumptions

This guide assumes you have the following:

• Rocky Linux with the GNOME desktop environment installed.

How to add your online accounts

Open up the GNOME Activities overview in the top left corner (or with the Meta or Win key), and search for Online Accounts. Alternatively, you can open the Settings panel and find Online Accounts on the left side.

Either way, you will end up here:

Note

You may have to click on a three-vertical-dots icon to access all the options shown here:

To add an account, click on one of the options. For your Google account, you will receive a prompt to log in to Google with your browser and authorize GNOME to access all of your data. For services like Nextcloud, you will see a login form like the one below:

Complete the relevant information, and GNOME will take care of the rest.

Account types supported by GNOME

As you can see in the screenshots, Google, Nextcloud, Microsoft, Microsoft Exchange, Fedora, IMAP/SMTP, and Kerberos are all somewhat supported. However, these integrations are not made equal.

Google accounts get the most functionality, though Microsoft Exchange and Nextcloud are not too far behind.

To make it easy to know exactly what is and is not supported, here is a table that the author shamelessly stole from GNOME's official documentation:

Provider	Mail	Calendar	Contacts	Maps	Photos	Files	Ticketing
Google	yes	yes	yes		yes	yes
Microsoft	yes
Microsoft Exchange	yes	yes	yes
Nextcloud		yes	yes			yes
IMAP and SMTP	yes
Kerberos							yes

Note

While "tasks" are not listed in the table above, they are seemingly supported, at least for Google. Testing for this guide revealed that if you install the Endeavour to-do manager (available via Flathub) on Rocky Linux and already have a Google account connected to GNOME, your tasks will be imported automatically.

Conclusion

While you can certainly use the web app versions of some of these services or third-party clients in some cases, GNOME makes it easy to integrate many of the most important features straight into your desktop. Just sign up and go.

If any service appears to be missing, check out the GNOME community forums and let them know.

Author: Ezequiel Bruni

Contributors: Steven Spencer