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Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 – On Windows
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Jul 04, 2008 04:28 AM
from the didn't-see-that-coming-did-you dept.
from the didn't-see-that-coming-did-you dept.
4WebChimps writes "As featured previously on Slashdot, the KOffice project is working towards a cross-platform, open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The most recent release, KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8, achieved that goal by being the first release for all three operating systems simultaneously. Want to try KOffice on Windows? TechWorld has a review (with screenshots) of KOffice on Windows, including the installation process which is as simple as clicking a few buttons (the online installer does the rest). Hopefully it won't be long before KOffice sits alongside OpenOffice.org as a usable cross-platform open source productivity suite."
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KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor 337 comments
Da Massive writes in with a link to a story on KOffice 2.0, the next generation of the KDE office suite due sometime next year. In an interview with KDE spokesman Sebastian Kugler, Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice. It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool. KOffice is not yet fully compatible with ODF but the claim is that 2.0 will be.
Submission: Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 on Windows by Anonymous Coward
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kwrite? (Score:2)
This is nice, but what I want to see is kwrite ported natively to windows.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
already done
Re:kwrite? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, think about it as a positive. Lots of people are testing the same UI on different platforms so any bugs found on Linux will be fixed in Windows too. Also users can move between operating systems without having a radically different interface.
Strategically KOffice matters to the Office File Format debate... OpenDocument (ODF) vs Microsofts OOXML.
Healthy competition in standards is needed like it is in the browser market. KOffice uses ODF (of course it couldn't use OOXML without reverse-engineering) and by being the second most popular implementation it helps keep OpenOffice.org honest (not that there's any sign that they're not honest). When MSOffice support ODF then KOffice will be more important still -- it will help evaluate ODF compliance and interoperability. [softwarefreedom.org]
Microsoft Office earns them 10 billion and a part of that is coming out of your country's economy -- competition in the form of KOffice is very good indeed. It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.
Yep, pretty soon I'll be installing Firefox to replace my Windows installation.
Re:kwrite? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:kwrite? (Score:5, Informative)
What does he mean? He means he would like to see Kwrite [kde-apps.org] ported natively to Windows.
The word processing component of Koffice, to which I assume you think he is referring, is called "KWord".
Parent
kwrite via MS Windows version of KDE! (Score:5, Informative)
In which case you should be looking at the KDE install for windows, sorry it's via an easy-as-falling-over installer too.
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation [kde.org]
Kwrite IIRC is part of the default installation - it's on my Vista install (I'm not rebooting to check).
More info at http://windows.kde.org/ [kde.org] too.
HTH
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll allow myself to go on a slightly off-topic rant here.
This "cross-platform UI" thing in OO.o is ridiculous. It looks like shit, at least the GTK interface. Even the scrollbars aren't correct if you look closely, and refreshing issues make the equation editor nearly unusable. This is because their GUI abstraction layer is FUBAR.
There are only 3 corect ways here:
1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets
2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit
Re:kwrite? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thanks, actually I already tried this, and it's not that good, unfortunately. It lags rather a lot on my machine, and the text rendering is quite poor too.
Not that it isn't a nice start, but that's why I specified 'native'. I want Kwrite working on windows without needing anything but windows QT.
Parent
euch (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people like to start a download then go off and have lunch whilst something downloads, not to come back and find out it wants you to download some more stuff.
Re:euch (Score:5, Interesting)
An online installer shouldn't be 20mb, it should be less than 2mb and pull in just the components necessary to install the rest of the program. The exact size is going to vary from application to application.
The point of online installers is that they are in theory at least going to be downloading just what you're installing. If a program doesn't offer any options in terms of what to install, it shouldn't offer an online installer as there isn't really any benefit to doing so.
Parent
Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)
i think i heard that kde have a long term plan of being able to run a full KDE desktop session on top of windows - presumably this package manager is the foundation of that ultimate goal.
Parent
Re:euch (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, I was hoping they would be a little more quick with it, but I think you are right in saying "long term plan" was about right, although I imagine that if its anything like Slashdot (et al) that trying to find people to blaspheme and create Windows stuff is a problem.
Although, im not sure where the 20MB's came from now anyways (I responded before even looking).. but after looking [kde.org] the installer is only 1.6MB ... which isnt too bad, seeing how many languages it supports, and the fact it may even come with 2 different compilers aswell...
Parent
Re:euch (Score:5, Informative)
The benefit is that the installer will take care of dependencies, so that the user doesn't have to install a >100 MB package for each program she wants, or to install a huge package of apps if she only wants a few.
I can't think of a reason why this shouldn't be obvious.
Parent
Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe a lot of users don't know what a software dependency is?
It's a valid point - very few people in the real world care or understand about what a shared library is even if you tell them carefully. Let's face it - being into computers is not a majority thing. Most people don't give a stuff. They really just want things to work easily for them.
Parent
Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a perfectly valid point, but those people shouldn't pollute Slashdot with their silly complaints. Back in the days, people who self-identified as "nerds" would have endless and pointless discussions of making Linux-powered robots that could brew coffee, or configuring Emacs to do it or whatever (single-threaded coffee, urgh), but these days there's a loud majority of Slashbots who seem to think that market share is the only valid goal and hence the only valid technical goal is that idiots should be able to use it: the idiot as the epitome and endpoint of human technical endeavours.
These people claim the superiority of "it just works" over "how does it work?", and regularly chip in with smug Apple sales pitches, technically and socially impossible suggestions such as that Gnome and KDE should merge, and that software with special dependencies should work just as software without those. The only positive way to deal with these idiots is with sarcasm. I'm sure that if we cared about their views, then we should listen to them, but we shouldn't.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I dunno exactly how hard it is to explain, but remember this... you are talking about trying to explain software dependencies to people who do not yet understand that hardware needs software to run. They can't wrap their minds around drivers. I should know. I have to try to explain things like this every day at the repair shop I work at.
These people also think that their hard drives are the same as their ram, since both refer to the same units (MB and GB). I can't tell you how many times a customer will
Plans for KOffice on CD? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't think of a benefit that couldn't be replicated through another method with both less hassle for the user AND less work for the developers.
Slashdot recently ran a story about a study of dial-up Internet users [slashdot.org], which showed that 49 percent of dial-up Internet users in the United States couldn't afford broadband. The OpenOffice.org project works around this by listing vendors that will distribute copies on CDs for a fee [openoffice.org]. Once KOffice for Windows is out of alpha and beta, who will be the first to do the same for KOffice?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
doesn't look like Windows 3.11 anymore,
While style is not unimportant, I'm quite a bit more interested in reasonable features, stability, and keyboard navigation.
Here's a shout out to all ma homiez that really don't require a skinnable, theme-able printing dialog!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's a shout out to all ma homiez that really don't require a skinnable, theme-able printing dialog!
But this is KDE, the print dialog will be skinnable AND themable, The only part of my setup another KDE user would recognise would be my panels.
Why ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why had this taken so long? KOffice is built with Qt, a robust cross-platform gui toolkit, http://trolltech.com/products/qt/ [trolltech.com].
Being a enterprise developer using Qt, the worse that I've had to deal with is some linking issues with dynamic libraries and GUI adjustments when porting to windows from linux...
Perhaps the "KDE" portion of the code is harder to port than the "Qt" portion?
Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)
Because the older versions of Qt that the old KDE was built on was only free/Free on Linux. Windows Qt used to be only available with a expensive commercial license, and nobody from KDE felt like paying for the privilege of supplying free software to Windows users.
Parent
Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)
QT was not GPL on windows until version 4
Parent
Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Until you run into incompatibilities between different JREs.
Re:Why ... (Score:4, Interesting)
People are just not aware of that.
The problem is the deployment of alpha software, we have no volunteers to even make good screenshots (the article shows GIMP on one of them!). Don't expect developers to work more than 24h a day
Again, there is single codebase in most KDE apps (minus examples like Konsole), no "hard porting" is needed except work on dependencies that are non-Qt, e.g. less portable filter dependencies for Krita.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why had this taken so long?
eeerrr... because they have been busy porting it from Qt3 to Qt4.
--
Simon
Review? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Excellent news (Score:3, Interesting)
While this is certainly great news for KDE realistically we are going to be able to count the number of Windows users on one hand. There will be plenty of people (me included) that will down load it to see how good it is but then never use it again because it's incompatable with other office software*. While I know it can read ODF and .doc etc it doesn't do it well enough that it's a drop in replacement for MS Office or even Open Office.
Personally I really hope that they port Kontact soon. It's streets ahead of Thunderbird and a half way decent competitor to Outlook.
* any broken formatting when opening a non-native file format means it's incompatible as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Excellent news (Score:5, Informative)
My personal favorite is Krita, which IMHO is surpasses GIMP in many ways. Full CMYK support, much more friendly user interface and better intergration with the Office suite.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is funny. Imagine going to your boss and telling him that some Office bug would cause small rendering errors in 10% of your documents, mandating fixes in up to 1% of old documents that needed re-use. He'd be very slightly concerned.
Now tell him that it'll cost a few thousand dollars to remedy this, you'll have to accept vendor lock-in to prevent it, and that even that version has errors, just fewer, with your documents. You'd need to hire a portability expert to check all the documents for problems and
Unique (Score:4, Interesting)
One slight problem... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll second that! (Score:5, Interesting)
I routinely have statically linked executables that will just refuse to uninstall and I can't get rid of the entry. Then I'm stuck ripping out shards of the program from every folder structure and the registry... for the next two years. At that point, they're still resident when I blow away my OS partition and steamroller a new Windows install.
People are used to Windows install routines by now; you get the programName-setup.exe or
Full disclosure: I run Slackware and Windows at home (and BSD and Mac) and prefer to compile from source, at work we use RHEL and Windows and if not for the ease of having repositories, I'd take MSI-2/3 over RPM-2/3 any day of the week.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's really needed is for the LSB to finish ironing out a point of standardization for Linux packages so that all package managers can easily install software packages so that you'll have smaller downloads and better installation management when installing out-of-the-repo software. For Windows users though, it's highly unlikely that they will have any of the req
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows users install runtimes all the time, .net runtime, java runtime, visual basic runtime, new msvc runti
FLOSS flood (Score:5, Interesting)
1997 called... (Score:5, Funny)
... and they want their UI back.
Re:1997 called... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:1997 called... (Score:5, Funny)
MacOSX and Linux called and want their UI back from Vista ....
Oh yeah??
Xerox called, they want their Windowed GUI paradigm back from OSX, X-Window, MS Windows, et all.
Parent
Good Free Software WordPro Recommendation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been a TeX user most of my working life. But since becoming a teacher, I've realized that I need a word processor for making pretty handouts. Each one of my handouts is layed out differently, so doing that in TeX was taking too much time.
But, OOWriter is driving me batty. Really, I just need to make numbered paragraphs with numbered points underneath. I need to be able to paste pretty clipart and wrap paragraphs around or through them. I need to be able to write Japanese text. And I need to be able to output PDF (optionally doc file format too).
It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.
So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?
Re:Good Free Software WordPro Recommendation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I looked at http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org] a few years ago, and it was alright. It wasn't what I wanted though, not needing or knowing LaTeX.
However, you already use TeX, so it might just what you want.
Or alternatively, have a look at AbiWord from http://www.abisource.com/ [abisource.com] it is simple, and shouldn't screw things up if you use the native file format (an XML based thingy).
I use AbiWord all the time for quick loading WP without too many fancy things. One caveat, it sometimes crashes for no explicable reason, and then ca
Re:Good Free Software WordPro Recommendation? (Score:5, Funny)
Uncheck "Gremlins" on the advanced options tab.
Parent
Just tried it out (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do we really need two or more office alternatives?
Yes, we do. Your question is like saying "Do we need anything else that's not MS Office?"
Having at least two cross-platform office suites gives people choice. You don't have to like ooo's interface/speed/memory usage because now you have Koffice, and if you don't like Koffice, you have ooo, abiword-gnumeric, etc.
I personally, like Koffice a lot more than ooo, maybe the ooo team could work together with Koffice :).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some devels were posting shots of KDE running on Windows.
Qt4 made major improvements which allowed for KDE4 to be easier ported to Windows.
For KOffice to function, you have to have KDE4 installed. And the installer from RTFA is essentially alpha installer for KDE4 for Windows - now also including KOffice. Even if you would select only KOffice, most of KDE4 would be also installed since KOffice depends on it.
If you are not sure, just give it a try - http://www.koffice.org/releases/2.0alpha8-release [koffice.org]