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KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor
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.
Even the 1.x versions are noticeably better (at least from a UI perspective). I've really been looking forward to KOffice 2.0 also because with KDE 4.0 it should eventually be available for Windows too...something that's still a requirement if you need to share stuff with other people.
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"?
How we know is more important than what we know.
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"?
If open source didn't give people more choices, would there really be any point to it?
This is my sig.
Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than "Microsoft Office" and "Open Office dot Org", they threw in the towel. Seriously, it's an office suite. Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.
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You're not kidding. This article made me think to go install v 1.6. On a 1.8 Ghz processor running Gnome, Kword for ex opens extremely quickly and opens files quickly as well. This gives me hope that the rest of the codebase is that lean and clean and that it can eventually outdo oo.org. Hopefully it can start to hit critical mass to achieve greater developer mindshare. It's already got oo.org beat in code quality it seems, so hopefully soon in features.
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.
You're not kidding:
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
As long as you run KDE, I guess. Otherwise, it will take a much longer startup just to put every single daemon KDE uses and load all other libraries.
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.]
I don't care what bells and whistles are added, what shiny new GUI paint is applied, how much faster the app runs, etc, etc, etc. Office 2007 is on the street, and we are going to be hit with a barrage of OOXML files that can't be opened by anybody who's not running Microsoft. Any contender in this space needs to address this problem, and right now.
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> While I can't speak volumes about Gnome and GTK. I can say that you views of KDE and QT do not appear to be based on facts, but more assumptions and preconceived notions.
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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.
You underestimate how huge OpenOffice is. Its codebase might even be bigger then the entire KDE project. Since OpenOffice has its own (crappy) crossplatform GUI system, its pretty much a DE in its own right.
surely, in fact, the linux kernel uses object oriented programming in things like the VFS layer. The thing is, doing OOP in C is no more efficient than C++, it really is just a matter of syntax. And if you have a language which gives you OOP and is generally efficient..then why not use it.
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.
The difference lies in the Qt4 licensing versus Qt3.
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.
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