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.

Comments

KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

The main benefit KOffice 2.0 brings is that it's sleek and fast. Unlike OpenOffice.org, KOffice has a very sensible architecture. Now, part of that is because KOffice is a far newer application. It builds directly on top of Qt, rather than implementing its own UI layer (like OpenOffice.org does). It also has a far more sensible component model, that suffers from only a small fraction of the bloat of the OO.o model.

While OpenOffice.org may have a larger feature set at this point, it just won't be able to compete with KOffice when it comes to being responsive and memory-efficient. Having built the KOffice source code from SVN just last week, I can tell you that you'll notice the difference immediately. OpenOffice.org just feels really damn sluggish, while KOffice is quick.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Aladrin]

I installed it when I learned of Krita because I wanted to try it out. I had some issues with opening a file (forget what kind now) and tried KOffice and was very surprised to learn it not only opened it, but did it fast.

It has been my office app of choice since then.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[theguyfromsaturn]

And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images. Scribus is also nice to import PostScript (why not PDFs?...) and respect the layout, but the text is usually broken down into individual characters. KWord does a great job with it. All in all, they each do their own job. It has allowed me to save some documents whose original editable copies got lost somehow... and for which I only had the PDF left. It's not as good as OOo at opening MS Office documents though, and the equations from ODF files aren't imported yet, but it's awesoooome.

Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[Zombie Ryushu]

Why is it that Kontact does not have KOffice integration and Kerberos support. Kontact+eGroupware would be an Exchange Killer IF Kontact and eGroupware supported Kerberos so that I don't have to setup kwallet with Domain login and passwords for remote Calendars/Tasks/Address Book with XML-RPC.

Why no love of Kerberos!

Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now. It's a suite of open-source, cross-platform Perl libraries, using Gtk2 for the GUI. The old website ( complete ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/. I'm right now working on a revamped website ( incomplete, but with up-to-date download links and new screenshots ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_new/.

There are 3 main components: a form object, a datasheet object, and a reporting module ( which exports to PDF via PDF::API2 ). I'm also working on a GUI object builder that exports XML for all 3 objects. Click on the 'future' link to see some screenshots of it in action. Note that I'm also looking for developers to help out, and maybe create a commercial project out of it ( I'm as-yet undecided whether to do this or not ).

I've had a number of large, complex production systems built on these libraries in use for about 2 years now. Please try it out, comment, report bugs, help out ... :)

Re:It's about time

[EvilRyry]

15 seconds? My 4 year old laptop running gusty can get a cold start on OOo in about 5 seconds. Subsequent startups take about 2-3 seconds. Of course this is still an eternity compared to the near-instant starts of MS Office though.

Re:It's about time

[socsoc]

near-instant starts of MS Office though. This must be a new version I never heard of. My userbase has installs of 2k, 2k2, 2k3 and 2k7 and constantly bitch about the speed it takes to open a file. Maybe we should revert back to 97 in an effort to find the version you are speaking about. My OOo boots faster than MS office.

Re:It's about time

[MoxFulder]

Anyways, I have a question. I can't think of a single good reason to use Access (or Access-like databases). Can somebody tell me what sort of applications would actually call for a wretchedly limited application like that? Access *is* truly wretched as far as an actual DB backend. The early versions of MySQL were far more powerful and fast, for example. But the real killer feature of Access is the ability to create tables and interfaces to them graphically. It's actually very good at that, and I haven't seen a decent replacement for Linux. A non-technical person can sit down with Access and make, say, a database of their recipes, or book collection, or company purchase orders... and make a decent GUI to do CRUD on it.

For example, a few years ago my ex-girlfriend had to make a large database of English loanwords used in China for her undergrad thesis. I tried to get her to use MySQL, but the lack of any GUI at the time was a turnoff. She used MS Access successfully instead.

I hear that Kexi (KDE-based) is a very nice and rapidly improving Access replacement, but haven't tried it. Nothing like it for GNOME, AFAIK.

Re:Native Mac Version

[BrentH]

the native version of OpenOffice is probably several months away at best.

You mean just like KOffice 2.0? I have found NeoOffice to work fine with OSX. No crashes or strange things. Sometimes a tad sluggish, because it eats memory, but thats all. When OOo becomes ative, I'll check it out and probably KOffice too, but there's no problems with NeoOffice.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[waferhead]

That list of deps (installing Koffice on a Gnome based system) is about the same size as installing only Gnumeric (which is largely Gnome based) on a simple KDE based system.

Hard drive space is cheap.