OpenOffice.org: KDE Integration Project Launched

vfs writes "Someone at pclinuxonline.com noticed that a OpenOffice/KDE Integration Project has been started to "provide tight (but optional) integration of the OpenOffice.org to the KDE environment beginning with KDE look and feel and ending with KDE data sources." This could offer a great opportunity for enterprises to deploy an integrated, unified desktop." (Here's the dot.kde.org post on the project.)

Comments

KOffice

[Ianoo]

I, for one, am glad they're admitting that KOffice is simply not mature enough for prime-time. No offense to the KOffice developers, I'm sure they are all far better programmers than I am and I'm sure they work hard on their project - but every time I use the suite it seems to crash for various reasons, which is not a good thing if I'm trying to work on a document and haven't been saving it every five minutes.

Maybe in a few years KOffice will be more mature and then all the KDE people can use it, but until then OpenOffice with tighter KDE integration seems like a fairly good idea. I don't care whether they recode the whole interface in QT or not, but maybe a Ximian-like tweaking to integrate the suite with KDE's VFS, printing system and open/save dialogs plus some KDE-ish toolbar buttons (it already can take on QT's colourscheme IIRC) would be more-or-less sufficent. If they want to take it further, of course, then that'd be even better.

Look'n'feel

[Nucleon500]

Finally! OO.org's toolkit has always bugged me - it's kinda slow, never looks like anything else, and menus don't go away when you click on the titlebar. Besides, having yet another toolkit increases the load time and memory requirements. One of the goals seems to be a Qt backend for VCL, and eventually a new widget set might be used.

Of course, the big question is, which one. What are your favorites, people? I like the idea of wxWindows, though I wish it had a Qt port. In the long run, I'd rather see something like X but with server-side widgets, and I think wxWindows might be easiest to adapt to this model. In the short term, Qt or GTK would be great.

Re:Qt?

[njchick]

But for Windows, Qt means no interface, as long as OOo remains free software and Qt for Windows doesn't become one.

OOo has an abstraction layer to deal with different toolkits. Qt is not a replacement for it because its free version is not as portable as OOo itself. Qt would be just another layer. gtk or wxWindows could be a replacement from the whole GUI stack in OOo.

Am I the only one

[Kethinov]

Am I the only one who sees this as a waste of time? KDE already works. OO.org already works. OO.org already works in KDE. All this time spent on making it look better could be used in giving Linux some real features that it really needs.

Re:Am I the only one

[pr0c]

"Kethinov: Am I the only one who sees this as a waste of time? KDE already works. OO.org already works. OO.org already works in KDE. All this time spent on making it look better could be used in giving Linux some real features that it really needs."

Exactly the thinking that costs us linux users. Working isn't good enough, windows 'works'. We need shit that goes above and beyond if we want to grow.

Re:Am I the only one

[Chainsaw]

You're right, of course. Creating an intelligent installer system that abstracts the creation of icons, checking if an application is installed and even choice of UI (KDE/Gnome/Windowmaker/curses). The problem here is quite odd - if I were to write a wonderful system that could do everything that you could ever demand, people would STILL complain and duplicate my work because it was written in C++ and not C.

However... The Qt/GTK+ non-workandlookalike crap can be solved in a pretty easy way. Make a small library that they BOTH use to draw widgets. That is - both 'new QButton("OK")' and 'gtk_new_button_with_label("OK")' would generate a component that looks, feels and IS the same. How come that neither of the two have proposed this and seen that it sucks considerable less than the current way?

Yes, you are

[Feztaa]

Integrating OOo into KDE will be awesome, it will provide for greater consistency between applications, and there will simply be one less reason for people to complain about all the inconsistent GUI toolkits on Linux.

Now, all we need is a rewrite of Mozilla in Qt... :)

No K

[fm6]

You assume that KOffice has a serious reason to exist. It doesn't. Perhaps it made sense at one time for KDE to try to replicate every Microsoft desktop software. But now it's time for them to adjust their goals. They need to acknowledge that they don't have the resources to do everything they'd like to do. They especially don't need to duplicate the work of the OpenOffice team. If OO interoperability were as much an issue as it used to be, things might be different.