KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor 337
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.
It's about time (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:freedom not numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of the "open source" movement is to improve the way software is developed by opening it up and distributing it.
The point of the "free software" movement is to ensure that software is freely redistributable, and modifiable by the users of the software.
As for this "choice" thing you're talking about. That's the function of the market isn't it? Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"?
Uh...he's right (Score:3, Insightful)
If open source didn't give people more choices, would there really be any point to it?
Re:why don't they think of a catchy name (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST! (Score:4, Insightful)
I can certainly say the formula editor is miles ahead of oo.org's in terms of ease of use. I get a font error right away though in starting the formula editor, so I guess I'm off to file a bug report.
Re:GNOME or other wms (Score:3, Insightful)
sudo apt-get install koffice
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
karbon kchart kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kexi kformula kivio kivio-data
koffice-data koffice-libs koshell kplato kpresenter kpresenter-data krita
krita-data kspread kthesaurus kugar kword kword-data libarts1c2a
libavahi-qt3-1 libopenexr2c2a libpoppler1 libpoppler1-glib libpoppler1-qt
libruby1.8 libwv2-1c2
Suggested packages:
khelpcenter koffice-doc-html fam koffice-i18n koffice-dev koffice-doc
wordnet tetex-extra
Recommended packages:
perl-suid openoffice.org-mimelnk kghostview latex-xft-fonts ruby libkscan1
libarts1-akode
The following NEW packages will be installed:
karbon kchart kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kexi kformula kivio kivio-data
koffice koffice-data koffice-libs koshell kplato kpresenter kpresenter-data
krita krita-data kspread kthesaurus kugar kword kword-data libarts1c2a
libavahi-qt3-1 libopenexr2c2a libpoppler1-qt libruby1.8 libwv2-1c2
The following packages will be upgraded:
libpoppler1 libpoppler1-glib
2 upgraded, 28 newly installed, 0 to remove and 112 not upgraded.
Need to get 76.7MB of archives.
After unpacking 187MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.
Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST! (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end, I guess it is fast for KDE users; people using other desktop environments will see no difference.
[Just guessing here, from my experience with older KOffice parts running inside GNOME. Yes, they run and will still run.]
Can it open OOXML files? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based. (Score:2, Insightful)
My views are based on my experience with KDE.
I was a KDE and supporter from the start.
I switched to XFCE. I have tried GNOME, but it's not for me currently.
> KDE is NOT simply QT plus bloat, the goals of the KDE library are to provide a consistent API to applications to work well with the KDE desktop.
> Don't mis-interpret this as KDE zealotry, I imagine that Gnome provides some sort of API to help applications integrate well with the desktop as well.
It's one thing to provide extra functionality possibly missing from the toolkit underneath.
It is quite another if the library ties the application to a specific desktop and ties to other random daemons.
Example: run konsole in non-kde, and it launches random things like the arts sound daemon.
I would not expect that a Qt Console would launch a sound daemon. I don't think kdelib has any constrained purpose. (except the vague purpose you stated: "to work well with the KDE desktop").
My problem with KDE was that there was no clear boundaries for dependencies.
The daemons that are not desktop specific, should not be part of the desktop. Sound daemons, printer daemons, and other daemons should be independent of the desktop.
No, the dependency problem is not unique to KDE, but KDE"s kitchen sink packages, like kdebase do not help my impression of it.
I am in favor of separate packages for individual apps and libs. The kitchen sink approach masks dependency problems.
I use XFCE because it is simple and functionally complete for me. The bonus side effect of using XFCE is that it is not easy or natural to use apps that have funky dependencies on gnome or kde.
Perhaps KDE4 has fixed some of the dependency problems. If I can install konsole without installing or launching the kitchen sink, then I will look at it again.
Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's just another tool in the toolbox, i like using many languages and it's just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.
Re:Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Qt3 was available with a GPL license only for X11, so the previous effort to port KDE to windows had to reimplement a GPL version of Qt for win32 from scratch, which is quite a big undertaking.
Qt4 is available under the GPL for every platform, so that big roadblock is cleared. And the KDE project is officially supporting and ecouraging the win32 port this time.
Also, some other things like KDE switching to a much nicer and cross platform build system than autoconf/automake (cmake) probably helps a lot too.
The reason a port is useful is because there are some very good applications in KDE that really deserve more exposure. And I suspect there are quite a few people like me who have to use windows at work and are frustrated to be unable to use some of those nice KDE apps at work.
Re:Please try my database libraries / app (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF dude? This is the 2nd post that's complained about my attitude to OO languages, whereas I said nothing of the sort. I said that Python is anal. It is. If you take a look at the changelogs for a lot of projects, particularly smaller projects ( and I'm thinking Enlightenment-0.17 particularly ), almost half of the changes are people reformatting code. They like it like that. In my opinion, while they're not being particularly productive, this is their God-given right