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

Who uses KrapOffice anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't, so I guess that means no one does.

Re:Who uses KrapOffice anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

A couple of weeks ago we decided to cruise out to Ryan's Steakhouse for dinner. It was a Wednesday night which means that macaroni and beef was on the hot bar, indeed the only night of the week that it is served. Wednesday night is also kid's night at Ryan's, complete with Dizzy the Clown wandering from table to table entertaining the little bastards. It may seem that the events about to be told have little connection to those two circumstances, but all will be clear in a moment.

We went through the line and placed our orders for the all-you-can-eat hot bar then sat down as far away from the front of the restaurant as possible in order to keep the density of kids down a bit. Then I started my move to the hot bar. Plate after plate of macaroni and beef were consumed that evening, I tell you-in all, four heaping plates of the pseudo-Italian ambrosia were shoved into my belly. I was sated. Perhaps a bit too much, however.

I had not really been feeling well all day, what with a bit of gas and such. By the time I had eaten four overwhelmed plates of food, I was in real trouble. There was so much pressure on my diaphragm that I was having trouble breathing. At the same time, the downward pressure was building. At first, I thought it was only gas which could have been passed in batches right at the table without to much concern. Unfortunately, that was not to be. After a minute or so it was clear that I was dealing with explosive diarrhea. It's amazing how grease can make its way through your intestines far faster than the food which spawned the grease to begin with, but I digress...

I got up from the table and made my way to the bathroom. Upon entering, I saw two sinks immediately inside the door, two urinals just to the right of the sinks, and two toilet stalls against the back wall. One of them was a handicapped bathroom. Now, normally I would have gone to the handicapped stall since I like to stretch out a bit when I take a good shit, but in this case, the door lock was broken and the only thing I hate worse than my wife telling me to stop cutting my toenails with a pair of diagonal wirecutters is having someone walk in on me while I am taking a shit. I went to the normal stall.

In retrospect, I probably should have gone to the large, handicapped stall even though the door would not lock because that bit of time lost in making the stall switch proved to be a bit too long under the circumstances. By the time I had walked into the regular stall, the pressure on my ass was reaching Biblical proportions.

I began "The Move."

For those women who may be reading this, let me take a moment to explain "The Move." Men know exactly what their bowels are up to at any given second. And when the time comes to empty the cache, a sequence of physiological events occur that can not be stopped under any circumstances. There is a move men make that involves simultaneously approaching the toilet, beginning the body turn to position ones ass toward said toilet, hooking ones fingers into ones waistline, and pulling down the pants while beginning the squat at the same time. It is a very fluid motion that, when performed properly, results in the flawless expulsion of shit at the exact same second that ones ass is properly placed on the toilet seat. Done properly, it even assures that the choad is properly inserted into the front rim of the toilet in the event that the piss stream lets loose at the same time; it is truly a picture of coordination rivaling that of a skilled ballet dancer.

I was about half-way into "The Move" when I looked down at the floor and saw a pile of vomit that had been previously expelled by one of those little bastards attending kids night; it was mounded up in the corner so I did not notice it when I had first walked into the stall. Normally, I would not have been bothered by such a thing, but I had eaten so much and the pressure upward was so intense, that I hit a rarely experienced gag reflex. And once that reflex started, combined with the intense pressure upward caused by

Re:Who uses KrapOffice anyway?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my crazy youth I worked in a nightclub, one of the bartenders sister once came from some distant city to come to the club. Apparently she had too many Es that night because this story is a pretty accurate description of what she did to the female toilets. Except with her it was 'arse' because the story took place outside the US.

Shit up the walls, literally.

"Competitor" my ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

If it doesn't work in Windows, it will only see a fraction of the OO.o market.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[zsouthboy]

RTFA:
KDE 4's framework is cross-platform.
They plan to release this on Windows as well.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[japhmi]

From the fine article, first paragraph.

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[HeathWater]

OO.o also opens MS docs and MS Office is able to open saved OO.o documents allowing you to more easily share documents with those using MS.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[teh moges]

This is good news. I've been looking for a word processor with a good set of features without the bloat. I've been trying KOffice for a little while now, not quite used to it yet, but it is looking to take over, at least for myself. Reading on the features that will be available soon, I'm really looking forward to this release.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an even more +5 Informative version:

"While the industry is focused on the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly being ignored by the computing world as they work on the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X"

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[AJWM]

KOffice also opens MS docs and spreadsheets, and can save in .doc or .xls format. I don't know how well that is supported in terms of very elaborate stuff, but the docs and spreadsheets readily accessible to me here worked fine.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[Kjella]

And just to expand on that, there are really several different things going on:
1) Qt 4, the underlying system library is now dual licensed GPL/commercial on the Windows platform by Trolltech, before only commercial on Windows.
2) As a result, the kdelibs (the core KDE libraries) for KDE4 has been made cross-platform. Like KDE4, they're still unreleased (at beta 2 still I think) but I did manage to get a KApplication compiled and running on Windows.
3) Since the KDE libraries are going cross-platform, so is all KDE applications that doesn't have additional *nix-specific dependencies. Note that KDE is trying to be a complete application framework not just an UI library, so this should be true for most.
4) Since the move from KDE3 to KDE4 is major, most applications like KOffice are also doing major rewrites not only because of the framework changes but also "if you want to change and break something, now's the time".

End result? Well it's always though to say with unreleased software but the general idea is that it'll be a three-pronged attack:
1. It's now cross-platform, so new markets
2. All applications should see a 20-30% speed improvement because of library improvements
3. Major new version with new features

Only downside is that it's taking quite long - Qt 4.0 was released in June 2005, though in personal experience it was a poor release but none the less it's taken a few years and KDE4 is still in development. The release of KDE4 is scheduled for December 11th, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It should bring the Gnome vs KDE flamefest to new heights :D.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[speaker of the truth]

Unfortunately OOo supports Office 2007 (via plugins) while KOffice currently doesn't and isn't going to support it natively. So unless KOffice also gets its own plugin, people will be stuck with installing wither both KOffice and OOo or just OOo.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[AJWM]

Well, at the moment there's still not a lot of Office 2007 out there, and KOffice works fine with the pre-'07 stuff.

In theory, if ODF and MSOOXML were reasonably well defined, it'd be possible to create an XSLT sheet to transform one to the other. I won't hold my breath on that, though, and I have my doubts as to how well what MSOffice 2007 uses matches what is defined by the MSOOXML spec. Given the size of that spec, the XSLT stylesheet would be huge.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[ajs318]

Qt 4, the underlying system library is now dual licensed GPL/commercial on the Windows platform by Trolltech, before only commercial on Windows.

Surely if Qt 3 was available under GPL, then it could have been ported to Windows anyway by any third party? TrollTech couldn't have prevented this according to GPL clause 6. The fact that apparently nobody bothered to do so only confirms my suspicion that Windows developers don't give a toss about software freedom and are interested only in writing closed-source payware applications, viruses and ad/spyware.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[orcrist]

Surely if Qt 3 was available under GPL, then it could have been ported to Windows anyway by any third party?

An effort was in fact started... I think it was abandoned when the new policy for QT 4 was announced.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[makomk]

In theory, I'm not sure if it's possible; how well does XSLT support bitmasks, for example?

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[AJWM]

how well does XSLT support bitmasks, for example?

Not well, but it can be done using arithmetic operators and constants that are powers of two. (Ugly, though.)

Which is yet another argument against MSOOXML as a standard -- new XML definitions shouldn't include bitmasks.

It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's about time

[fimbulvetr]

Fortunately, that's a good attribute for koffice to have over OO. Most operating systems can boot faster than OO can open.

Re:It's about time

[kyofunikushimi]

I'm really far more thrilled with getting the REST of KDE over to Windows than KOffice. I mean, it's really great that we'll have that option available to us and I will surely use it as often as possible on this work laptop, but without supporting the MS "open" xml doc format, chances are I'm going to need to use MS Office a whole lot more than I'd like... But thank GOD I'll finally have knetattach without firing up vmware!

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?

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I realised you were right.

Re:It's about time

[calebt3]

Less than 15 seconds!?!?!? (I timed it) What distro are you using that gets such phenomenal boot times?

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

[CastrTroy]

I use access all the time when people send me CSV files that have more than 65,000 rows in them, and therefore won't open in most spreadsheets. It's nice for one-time-use databases or just doing simple queries on csv files that clients have sent you. I wouldn't use it for any kind of permanent database, but that's usually how access applications get started, Somebody needs a quick and dirty database to use for a week to analyze some data, and 3 years later, it's still running, because somebody thought it would be easier to keep on using access than to upgrade to a real database.

Re:It's about time

[rduke15]

That's precisely why Access is great. Once you realize the database is still there after a few years and has become important, you keep the Access GUI and move the data out into a "real database".

Re:It's about time

[kyofunikushimi]

Somebody needs a quick and dirty database to use for a week to analyze some data, and 3 years later, it's still running, because somebody thought it would be easier to keep on using access than to upgrade to a real database.

Indeed, that is exactly what I've experienced.

Re:It's about time

[Bob54321]

Bit of an exaggeration... my laptop boots in 15-20sec and OOo takes 5sec to open (Arch Linux).

Re:It's about time

[MoxFulder]

Well... I must be doing something wrong, cause I get way slower times on way newer systems. Ubuntu Feisty, 2.0ghz Turion 64 x2, 1gb RAM. It still takes TEN SECONDS to cold-start OO.o to a blank document, and about 3 for subsequent starts. And on my 2ghz Athlon 64 with only 512mb RAM, it takes about thirty seconds. It's ridiculous.

OO.o has truly amazingly good MS Office import/export... it even gets equations and PowerPoint animations right most of the time!! And it runs snappy with 100-page documents with complex formatting, way better than MS Word in that regard. But the OpenOffice UI is ugly--it looks bad under KDE, GNOME, Windows, *and* Mac OS... quite a feat. And it's a serious memory hog. Its templates, database, and some export filters depend on Java for no good reason other than Sun wants a little Java in everything.

Despite these faults, I prefer OO.o to MS Office. I'd say it reached parity about a year ago. The word processor is faster with large documents than MS Word. The presentations lags powerpoint a bit in terms of graphical slickness, but is otherwise excellent. I don't use the OO.o spreadsheet program; I prefer Gnumeric, which is *extremely* fast, extremely reliable, integrates perfectly with my GNOME desktop, and generally kicks the crap out of Excel in my opinion.

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:It's about time

[aichpvee]

So is KSpread finally going to get cell freezing?

Re:It's about time

[Billhead]

Do you have it load on startup and sit in the taskbar, like it defaults to?

Re:It's about time

[agm]

Make sure you have this in you /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 localhost.<domain> localhost <machine-name> <machine-name>. <machine-name>.<domain>

Where <domain> is replaced with your domain name and <machine-name> is replaced with the name of your machine. OO.o does some silly dns lookup or some such thing and having a specially crafted "127.0.0.1" setting in your hosts file greatly speeds up OO.o.

Re:It's about time

[ajs318]

Yeah, but MS Office cheats -- it preloads most of itself while the Windows window manager is starting up.

Re:It's about time

[dylan_-]

OO.o does some silly dns lookup or some such thing and having a specially crafted "127.0.0.1" setting in your hosts file greatly speeds up OO.o.

Are you joking? Why would it do such a thing?

Re:It's about time

[Ash-Fox]

Do you have it load on startup and sit in the taskbar, like it defaults to?

I have never seen the quickstarter for OOo under Linux.

Re:It's about time

[gerrysteele]

OOO has an optional quickstart component you can use to do the same

Re:It's about time

[bigtomrodney]

What about OpenOffice Base? It's more or less a clone of Access anyway.

Re:It's about time

[calebt3]

No. That would eat up resources when I am not using it.

Re:It's about time

[davidsyes]

PLEASE, PLEASE, take a look at Lotus Approach before you even THINK of mimicking ms abscess. If you want END USERS to benefit from a niche database application ABSCESS is NOT the way to start. Access has SOME widgets (horizontal slider for detail tables, better table-linking INFORMATION GUI and links), but Lotus Approach is hands down VASTLY easier for end user.

"KDATA", or whatever it'll be called, would benefit from mimicking an AWARD-WINNING end-user relational database application. Access (to my knowledge) has NEVER won ANY awards, and is condemnable in that to "really get work done" in Access, one is pretty much going to be FORCED to become a semi-formal developer. Approach was even mimicked to some extend by theKompany's "Rekall", by people who used to use Lotus Approach, and sorta had to roll their own since IBM (my opinion in these next words) was doing NOTHING to help out Linux users with a mature, likable, stable, award-winning end-user database application.

KDE devs, go to a computer surplus store or go on-line and buy a few (sub $50) copies of Lotus SmartSuite and SEE what OpenOffice has (to their PERIL) been ignoring for half a decade. PLEASE, do not repeat or magnify the mistakes or ignorances of OO.o when it comes to interface usability in Word Processing, end-user databases, and such.

Re:It's about time

[jZnat]

I believe it's an issue with GTK+ on X11. Since X11 is network-transparent and all, I guess there's some weird support going on in GTK+ that ends up trying to look up your hostname via DNS if it isn't already in /etc/hosts.

Re:It's about time

[tyrione]

Kexi: http://www.kexi-project.org/

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I just timed my Gutsy beta, 2.2GHz core 2 duo 2GB ram laptop at 5 seconds cold, less than 1 second for subsequent. I always turn swap files off too.

Re:It's about time

[calebt3]

Sorry for bringing this up, but I do not have a domain. Do I just leave the areas blank (and do I need the ? )?

It doesnt compete with anything

[shitzu]

Until it runs on Windows and OSX as well as Linuxes, it does not compete with anything.

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[Anonymous Coward]

You are wrong. It competes with OpenOffice.org for the title for the best office suite on Linux. Which in itself must be about 0,0001% of an office productivity software market...

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[fimbulvetr]

You know if you took a few seconds to research something you're writing - or even speaking - about, it may help others think you're not such a dumbass. You might even up your intelligence. Alas, this is slashdot. The barrier of entry for intelligence here is so low, you don't even need to remember your username to post.

Here, check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit)

(That's a link, you can click it and it will take you to another place on the internet). As you can see, QT4 is ported to Windows, and other non-x11 OSs. In an amazing twist of coincidences, Koffice is written in QT4.

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[Anonymous Coward]

While QT might be cross-platform, show me a download of a decent binary build of KOffice for Windows or for OSX/Cocoa. Ok, move along, nothing to see here.

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ranger.users.finkproject.org/kde/index.php/Home

viola

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[cammoblammo]

viola

Just what is it that slashdotters find so interesting about medium sized stringed instruments?

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[Bluesman]

I propose we adopt a new standard. Viola is getting old.

Cello!

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[ronanbear]

their spell-checkers like them

That's so cute! It starts with a 'K'

[Anonymous Coward]

no, wait, I meant 'That's so retarded!'

Re:That's so cute! It starts with a 'K'

[speaker of the truth]

At least it doesn't have a URL for a name.

why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

The "K-" line of apps has all the cachet of Sam's Club or President's Choice. Why plant the presumption of value product mediocrity in people's minds before they even try it?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

> all the cachet of Sam's Club or President's Choice.

The obvious choice of K mart really didn't occur to you?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[kyofunikushimi]

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.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[westlake]

The "K-" line of apps has all the cachet of Sam's Club or President's Choice. Why plant the presumption of value product mediocrity in people's minds before they even try it?

At least you have been spared the pain of trying to bring credibility in marketing to The Gimp.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[halycon404]

because I was already taken. Can't name it I-office. or I-apps.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually like the "K-" and "G-" naming. It immediately tells me which library the application is built upon, so just by looking at the name I can already make some assumptions about how well it integrates with my desktop environment of choise, which just happens to be KDE. I only see it as a useful thing. I think it's nice if the application name is also descriptive telling you what the application is supposed to do, but I really couldn't care less what the applications are named. I find it hard to understand why the "K-" and "G-" naming style annoys some people, for me it's a great help.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[vux984]

Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than ..

This isn't about clever.

Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.

No, but its name shouldn't elicit feelings of mediocre, lower quality, and bargain basement cheap.

In Canada and much of the US at least, the store "K-mart" is a widely known 'walmart-like' store that's known for being a 'cheap/bargain department store'.

And he's suggesting a K-"product" like KOffice picks up on that K association. Sort of like naming it McOffice might resonate with the lower quality cheap McDonald's food (or McFood).

At least that's where I think he's going, I don't personally have that much of an association with the letter K. But then, I didn't live near a k-mart most of my life either.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[couchslug]

"K-" IS a Katchy Komputer Konvention.
Now if you'll excuse me, the Kleagle has kalled me to the Klavern.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[davester666]

iOffice!

Seriously, anyone remember those krappy khrysler k-cars?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, no offence intended but assuming that KOffice wants to be mainstream then that wouldn't be a mainstream reason for names. Microsoft Office uses its own toolkit on Windows but no one cares because it behaves much like the rest of the desktop, and similarly KDE can be configured to act like other desktops.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[arth1]

The K- nomenclature is a fair warning to users that unless he or she already runs KDE and thus have all the libraries loaded, it will be a MAJOR bloat to run.
I think it's fairly useful -- as a non-KDE user, if I have the choice between packages named kfoo, jfoo and xfoo, guess which one I'll try first?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Ostsol]

K-Mart didn't actually come to my mind when this topic was brought up. Actually, I starting thinking about how Apple adds "i-" to virtually every product they've released since the original iMac.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[speaker of the truth]

Whenever I hear KOffice or KMail I do not think of K-Mart. Guess it isn't as ingrained as you think. It'd be like saying GMail is a bad name because it makes people think of gangsters.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[aichpvee]

Actually, it'd be more like GMail being a bad name because it brings to mind gtk or, even worse, gnome.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[obarthelemy]

THE Office ?

Each of the apps could have a nice 'assistant', like le microsoft thingy everyone loved so much, but with an extra twist: each module's assistant would have the personnality of one of the series' characters. Pamela gets the drawing tool, that's a no-brainer ^^

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

Well only for fags like you who will stick to their ugly stupid KDE bullshit. Seriously, the desktop doesn't have to be ugly yet you KDE fagboys insist on using UGLY.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

when are you gnome queens going to stop projecting your homosexuality on others?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome post. Not even the most "light-headed" of KDE users would dare to mod that one further down.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[Anonymous Coward]

NO ONE cares about KDE. It's for anal faggots who would rather spend all day customizing how the Kdick goes into their Kass while the rest of us actually do some work.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[mhall119]

Yeah, because iMac, iPod, iPhone and iLife all equate to mediocre products in people's minds. Or do you just have something against the letter 'K' specifically?

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[PitaBred]

At least I know what KOffice does by looking at the name. WTF is a "Skype"? Or a "Google"? Words gain meaning as they're used. I think that if KOffice turns out a great product, it'll just become a "known" brand. There's nothing inherently bad about it.

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!

[Taxman415a]

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.

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!

[BRSloth]

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.]

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.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[arth1]

It's not as good as OOo at opening MS Office documents though

This might be the biggest block, cause you usually can't demand that everyone sends you documents in other formats -- they will use Word, Excel and Powerpoint, (and have Outlook convert pictures to multi-megabyte BMP files too, for that matter).

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[ortholattice]

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.

It would be nice would to have completely clean PDF to ODF conversion, preferable integrated with KOffice and OO.org of course, but even stand-alone version would be useful. Is ODF theoretically capable of exactly representing a PDF? Both specs are open, so there shouldn't be the undocumented proprietary format problem that hampers .doc conversion. Does anyone know what the issues are? (The KOffice folks must know some of the issues, since they're trying to do it.) A Google search for PDF2ODF shows some comments saying there's a converter on Sourceforge, but I couldn't find it there.

For the converse problem, OO.org seems to have done a good job of that with its PDF output.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

$pdf2ps document.pdf

(Part of ghostscript.)

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[sumdumass]

Now if I could just get Koffice to work in windows....

I like the Idea of lean and fast. Actually, I love it, both MS-office and open office are hogs of sorts. But I need to cross platforms more often then I would like. It does me little good to get used to something if I can't use it and take it with me so to speak.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[speaker of the truth]

Hey, isn't that a bit like IE on Windows?

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[timeOday]

I think OpenOffice is the only program I've ever considered abandoning ONLY because it runs so slowly. On a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo I can watch each individual icon redraw (not a good thing). It goes well beyond typical bloat, it must be something with the widget set or how they are using it. Maybe it makes heavy use of some instruction that's horribly slow on my particular video card, I don't know. But for me, the performance of OpenOffice leaves a big gap open for KOffice.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[eean]

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.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Tablizer]

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.

But by the time it catches up, processors may be faster such that speed is not a perceived problem for Open-Office. And/or OO.org may fix the low-hanging bottlenecks by that time.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[jmv]

I had no idea kword could open PDF files. That's really cool. Thanks for pointing that out.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[cmbofh]

... and in the times of StarOffice 5 it even came with a GUI that looked like a separate desktop.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[cmbofh]

It would be nice would to have completely clean PDF to ODF conversion, preferable integrated with KOffice and OO.org of course, but even stand-alone version would be useful. Well, since KOffice is able to import PDF you can just hit "save as" to store it as ODF.
I would call that integrated.

bdubSOv1iKIJ403M is right though that it won't be able to recover the original structure.
So the question is whether you can call that "clean". It just does what is possible.
No one suggest to build a lossless document workflow on that.

BTW: KOffice 2 will bring a lot of new scripting features.
I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to script KOffice to create a command line tool for PDF -> ODF conversion.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[eean]

Part of OO.o "bloatedness" has nothing to do with the speed it does things. KDE provides KOffice was a firm foundation that it can build on.

Like Krita is awesome, already better then The Gimp in my opinion. Next it just needs to beat out Painter and Photoshop. :)

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[m2943]

It builds directly on top of Qt, rather than implementing its own UI layer

So, it builds directly on top of someone else's cross platform GUI toolkit instead of building directly on its own cross platform GUI toolkit. I fail to see a difference.

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.

Mostly what I notice with trying to use KOffice under Gnome is that it takes a long time to start up, starts up several subprocesses, and prints a lot of crap.

I don't particularly like OpenOffice, but at this point, I fail to see how KOffice is any better.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[StormReaver]

"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."

I just tried it using KWord 1.6, with mixed results. The PDF did indeed get imported as text, but the layout was very bad. The title image contained in the PDF was inverted on the X axis, the font was way too big and of the wrong family, causing the text alignment to be non-existent. The "Select All" function only selects everything in the current frame, with no apparent way to select all text in all frames. There are several other usability problems along these lines, which I'll skip here.

That said, KOffice has made amazing progress this year alone. It's even more amazing when you consider the very small developer base working on this office suite. Even with the significant layout problems I saw converting the PDF for editing, it can convert PDF files to be editable! Those guys seriously rock.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. KOffice is approximately 1 MLOC, KDE is 3.5 MLOC excluding KOffice and OpenOffice.org is 7-8 MLOC. This means that the full OpenOffice.org is twice as big as KOffice + KDE.

(MLOC = Million Lines of Code)

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks very promising, but it still inserts a linebreak (ie a new paragraph) whenever the line breaks (without being a new paragraph). So far, is the same is copy pasting and having to delete those linebreaks. Simply doesn't help me, for I use latex for academic writing and my boss wants to edit/review it in word. Any suggestions?

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Riskable]

KOffice 2.0 is built on KDE 4 which doesn't use the dizzying array of daemons/processes that KDE 3 does so your argument is (mostly) moot. There will still be kded but it has been slimmed down thanks to the enhancements in QT4. For example, the DCOP daemon(s) go away in KDE 4 (it uses dbus) and it has become much more modular without as many cross-dependencies (there was a huge push for "modular KDE" in 4).

Not sure how all of that will work in Windows (because KDE 4 and KOffice 2.0 will run on it) without dbus but it can't be as bad as the bloat that is OpenOffice.org (I love it but man it is a resource hog and slower than it should be).

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[tuju]

Since OpenOffice has its own (crappy) crossplatform GUI system, its pretty much a DE in its own right.

Well.... it had its own desktop.

I guess it's still there, they just snipped the wires coming to your dashboard.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

I love KOffice, and Krita is good for digital camera files, but if you work with scanned film in the >30MP range it gets unbearably slow (1Gb, Dual Athlon MP 2600, 7200RPM) . But then so does Photoshop. Cinepaint is the only 16bit capable photo editor I've found that can handle the huge files. This is probably not an issue for most people.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Sentry21]

I'm not so sure about this...

Downloading the KOffice builds for OS X is a staggering experience; in order to install KOffice, I need 692 MB of libraries and 526 MB of application code, for a grand total of 1.2G - for an office suite?

In comparison, iWork '08 (the entire installation media) is about 583 MB, and Office 2003 (admittedly a little outdated, but it works surprisingly well) takes up a shocking 654 MB. Granted that iWork has 'only' presentations, word processing, and spreadsheets (though my personal favorite implementations of all three), and Office 2003 isn't universal, but I still don't think that remedying either situation would cause those applications to double in size.

Compare that with OpenOffice, whose 135 MB download on OS X is their third-largest, with the SPARC Solaris build edging them out by 2 MB and the Linux x86 RPM by 1 MB; or, compare with NeoOffice, whose (admittedly non-UniversaL) download tallies about 134 MB.

I'll weight until I actually try it to determine whether its speed is notable, but its size is astonishing... I hope that this is as a result of debugging symbols, unoptimized builds, or some other reason, but I'm not convinced that they can knock off the 1 GB that they'd need to match OpenOffice, or the 600M they'd need to match the other Mac office suites.

Still, we'll see...

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[eean]

Clearly those must be debug-enabled builds. Adding all the debug symbols does typically make the binary much much bigger then otherwise. Which makes sense, you shouldn't run KOffice 2 unless your willing to help out with crash reports so distributing binaries without the debug enabled would be irresponsible.

Its either that or there's some I clearly don't understand about Mac OS.

Anyways there are plenty of whole Linux distributions that include KOffice and are smaller then that.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[xhrit]

>So, it builds directly on top of someone else's cross platform GUI toolkit instead of building directly on its own cross platform GUI toolkit. I fail to see a difference. KDE is funded by trolltech, the makers ov qt. There is no difference.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[abigor]

Well, you're right, if you're going to use Gnome, then KOffice won't be any better than OpenOffice. If you use KDE, it is (going to be) awesome. So: OpenOffice = slow to start on all platforms, KOffice = slow to start on one (very poor) desktop.

Go for the gold

[jpfed]

Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice. I'm glad they're setting the bar high for themselves.

freedom not numbers

[wizardforce]

If it doesn't work in Windows, it will only see a fraction of the OO.o market.

The point of the open source movement was to ensure people have a choice. make software better and open and hopefully that will make it common. If Koffice can do better than Openoffice then they'll have the attention of at least the /.ers here :)

Re:freedom not numbers

[QuantumG]

The point of the open source movement was to ensure people have a choice. False.

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"?

Re:freedom not numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

False.
The point of the "open source" movement is to spread Communist ideals throughout the world. :-)

Re:freedom not numbers

[the_womble]

Markets do not give people choice. It is more the other way around. Choice is a pre-requisite for a competitive market, not the result of one.

In the case of software, the dangers of vendor lock-in, and the ease with which monopolies form, means that proprietary software gives people very limited choices.

Re:freedom not numbers

[QuantumG]

That's probably the most retarded semantic argument I've ever seen.

Re:freedom not numbers

[JohnBailey]

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"? Not as easily as free software. Its possible, but free software lowers the bar on both sides. I don't risk paying for something that is not right for my needs, and the maker doesn't risk money on something that could be a flop. And as the market is not a level playing field by any stretch, how likely would a for profit commercial app be to take on Microsoft in the office suite market or Adobe in the graphics market and sell enough to survive?

Re:freedom not numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"? But would your choice be "free"?

Re:freedom not numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"? No. Proprietary file formats and protocols tie you to a single vendor. In my dictionary, that's the opposite of "choice". There are millions of people who continue to use MS product, not because they "choose" to, but because there is no reasonable alternative. Microsoft knows this, and confounds interoperability completely intentionally. Because they are a huge US company, the US does nothing about it, but at least the EU is not stupid. The EU sees through these shenanigans, and in their own anti-trust proceedings have demanded that MS open their file formats and protocols. Why? To give people choices.

Re:freedom not numbers

[jadavis]

What's the difference between freedom and choice?

Re:freedom not numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for the record, I would make the same observations you did. Choice is important, but then there's those 4 GNU liberties which are the real premium, as you point.

That aside, IMHO, proprietary software won't give people choice. This is not perfect capitalism -- which, for starters and as per economic theory, favours new entrants.

We have seen where the whole system, when masterfully orchestrated, can lead us. In fact, "central planning" has been so pervasive in IT that one wonders if this is really market-driven at all.

i hope the database app delivers

[siddesu]

i tried 1.6 some time ago -- mostly because i needed something access-like on Linux. the database app on the surface looks a lot better than the horror the ooo thingy, except that it didn't work with pre-existing sql databases. one has to create a database from scratch, and there wasn't an easy (UI) way to even hookup an existing database after one creates a custom one. since my needs were really simple, i gave up, and instead used knoda (http://www.knoda.org/) which is similar, and works nicely for the kind of thing I needed.

the rest of the office implemenation seemed to almost work. of course, it wasn't completely compatible with OO, but i liked the interface better and would have used it if it had a useful PDF output. However the PDF i got out of it was really jagged (the letters jumping up and down around the line), and the opinion on the mailing list was at the time 'it isn't our problem', so I switched back to OO in the end.

I hope 2.0 delivers. I'll give it a try anyway :)

Re:i hope the database app delivers

[Anonymous Coward]

So...in other words...KOffice is your standard piece of crap open source project.

Big plans - check!
Buggy as hell - check!
Unfit for normal user operation - check!
Next version is rumored to be killer - check!

Not really surprising since most of the KOffice/KDE devs appear to be spending most of their time posting as ACs here on Slashdot ripping on OpenOffice...

Re:i hope the database app delivers

[cleatsupkeep]

And OpenOffice got some people to post as AC's to rip on KOffice. :-). *cough* Parent *cough*

Re:i hope the database app delivers

[davidsyes]

Nice. But before I can use it, I'd like integrated WYSIWYG charting, reporting, crosstab, and a few more things. It seems they are on to something. I think Knoda's been around more than 2 years, aye?

Have you seen Lotus Approach? Sadly, it's only on windoze, and even sadder, IBM came out with "Symphony", which I tried, and almost cried in anguish over. Symphony was supplanted by the combination of Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus Approach in use together, but singly, each did most of what the original Symphony did.

It's quite unfathomable/astonishing/mind-boggling that they co-opted the Symphony name and foisted it upon a new product that appears half-baked in that it lacks a decent database app. It's like IBM is just goddamningly-dogged-determined to NOT give us a database app unless we take Notes. Pity. Angering, in fact. Sadly, no one with programming skills and moxy is taking IBM to the carpet on this. Some of us users have for YEARS been begging IBM, and our pleas just fall on deaf ears, canned responses from IBM, and "don't-hold-out-hope" sympathies from other users who tried and failed ahead of us.

I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suites

[greenguy]

I'm a Gnome user (after road-testing KDE for a good six months), but I've been infected with the hype about KDE 4, and in particular, Koffice. If it's really as good as they say, there's a good chance I'll switch over. My job uses Macs, and I've found NeoOffice too unstable to use (four crashes in two hours). Supposedly, there will be a Mac OS X-native version of Koffice, which would fit the bill to replace friggin' MS Office.

My fallback -- and I'd just like to take this opportunity to veer off-topic, here -- is to put Ubuntu on a used CPU and run LTSP, with the Macs as thick clients. One way or another, I can't stand to see my office sink any more money into proprietary software.

good plotting and graphics?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be happy if it:

1. Has slightly more advanced plotting abilities, such as boxplots
   
2. Can embed PDF images (rather than rasterized PDFs, EPS or EMF/WMF formats)
   

I'm personally fine with PDFLaTeX and R, but I need to integrate with people that don't uses these low-level yet functional tools. Sadly, the general population needs to be able to have WYSIWYG technology, which is often overrated to true geeks.

Uh...he's right

[tjstork]

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?

Re:Uh...he's right

[glavenoid]

Disregarding the possible semantic problems with the word "choice", the point of open source software it that developers and end-users *can modify* the software code to suit their particular needs. Many people tend to tout the principle of "code reuse" in open software, but rarely mention "algorithm reuse", which I think is its best feature. So, if by choice you mean "selection of possible alternatives", then yes, there is a point to it. However, as stated, one can also *choose* to modify the code, so by [this] definition open source does in fact give more choices which is perhaps the point itself...

Re:Uh...he's right

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? That's as meaningless as saying "open source software exists". Yes. Obviously. The fact that it's there as an alternative to proprietary software offers a "choice". That's hardly the point of it, though.

Re:Uh...he's right

[spikeb]

uh, yeah. open source/free software in and of itself is a point.

Re:Uh...he's right

[Eivind Eklund]

Yeah, because people can now read or mod the code, which is an additional choice; I think that was what the parent was referring to. It is also a perspective I personally like - always think in terms of creating more freedom, ie more choice.

Eivind.

Re:Uh...he's right

[Fruit]

The point is to give people at least one "good" choice, not necessarily "more".

That's all good. Except...

[mpapet]

There's still no "print selection" option in the printer gui interface. This leads me to believe that there will be more of the same gotchas littered all over koffice. Noble effort though. Keep up the good work.

And while you are at it, please work on the print selection thingy sometime eh?

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!

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[nine-times]

Why no love of Kerberos!

Especially since it already starts with a "K"!

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[doyoulikeworms]

This post sure made me laugh. I, at first, thought it was a satirical post highlighting the absurdity that is applications' names.

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[solarce]

I've seen a lot of your comments on Kerberos, LDAP, etc and the success you've had with your home network. In fact I've browsed through your past comments just to read up on interesting comments you make in relation to that topic. But I notice you haven't put anything online about the steps you went through to get everything working. I'd be really interested to see you write and publish something. If you'd be interested in entertaining the idea, please email me brandon [at] inatree [dot] org

Cheers!

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[eean]

How would Kontact benefit from KOffice integration? A KWord HTML email editor? Hardly seems like a must-have...

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[Zombie Ryushu]

Well, one of the things is the implementation of change tracking against a Domain Controller, something MS Office has done for a while. The point is, that the Kontact XML-RPC experience needs to be seemless, and it is not.

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[eean]

Outlook is part of MS Office, but KMail and Kontact are part of the KDE PIM project, not KOffice. Thats where the confusion is. :)

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[Anonymous Coward]

they're working on those things. Actually, with KDE 3.5.8 and the KDE-PIM enterprise branch, you have much improved exchange and imap support already. Not perfect yet, but they're working on perfect for KDE 7 ;-)

Windows?

[jo7hs2]

Yeah, but will/does it run on Windows? I know TONS of people who have started using OpenOffice as a replacement for MS-Office. Why? Not because they support OSS. Not because they hate MS. Because they can't afford Office, but their computer DID come with Windows, and they have no desire to change. Unless it works in Windows, opens Word documents, and conforms to a look/feel that most Windows users can comprehend, it will only be a blip.

Re:Windows?

[kyofunikushimi]

Please read the article. First paragraph mentions Windows, Mac OS, and Linux (thanks to QT4)

Re:Windows?

[Lumenary7204]

Yeah, but will/does it run on Windows? Not yet, but give it a while; KDE is being ported to run natively on Windows:

KDE4 Windows Port

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but will/does it run on Windows? I know no one RFTA, but the first sentence of TFA:

• While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows , and Mac OS X.

So yes, it will (version 2.0) run on Windows. No, it does not currently (version 1.x) run on Windows.

Re:Windows?

[Secrity]

A native port of KDE on windows was started about two years ago; I don't recall seeing anything come of it. Personally, I see no reason for it to be ported to Windows.

Re:Windows?

[Lumenary7204]

Oops, meant to say

Not yet, but give it a while; KDE is also being ported to run natively on Windows

Re:Windows?

[nine-times]

Or how about OSX? I've heard something about QT offering easy porting to OSX... any truth there?

Honestly, I think having good ports on Linux, OSX, and Windows is a big deal. I believe it's part of the reason Firefox has been successful. Users can use the same app on any platform and have the same features, same rendering, same behavior, and roughly the same interface. From an IT standpoint, it's ideal since it cuts down on support/training issues. OpenOffice seems to be the only office suite with that advantage.

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree completely. This is the reason I put my small business on Open Office: price point. Our staff works from their home computers, and ten out of ten of those are Windows XP machines.

I'm not in love with Word and MS Office, but if you interact with businesses that use it, you need to be able to share content seamlessly. I can't imagine any professional with an office suite than can't open a Word doc.

Re:Windows?

[abigor]

Yes, I've run early alpha versions of KDE 4 apps on OS X. You can google for build instructions, but a word of warning - they are still in heavy development, so there will be problems. Simple apps like KEdit work fine though. After KDE 4 is released, there will be dedicated OS X builds for these apps and KOffice that will be simple to download and install.

Wait until the New Year, and give them a try ;)

Re:Windows?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

I can't imagine any professional with an office suite than can't open a Word doc.

Which is one great reason to keep OpenOffice around. It opens MSWord documents that MSWord can no longer open.

Re:Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, look at:

http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/krita/kritawin.html

and

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2997

Boudewijn Rempt, KOffice release dude

Re:Windows?

[MORB]

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.

Re:Windows?

[Ash-Fox]

opens Word documents

Sorry, Koffice can't help you there. Personally - I don't care that it can't open word documents, I already gave up on them when newer versions of Microsoft fail to render them correctly.

I really only care about having office suites these days that have a really good user interface and a standard format that can be opened in the future. I hope Koffice will be that suite as I am a KDE user and I have been disappointed occasionally with Koffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice in their current states.

Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[Lumenary7204]

It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool. Shouldn't be too hard; most of this capability exists as individual apps already. For example, the could probably implement code from the following fairly well-regarded entries listed on the KDE Apps site:

-- QCad
-- -- for flowcharting (if supplied with pre-defined shapes)

-- Pixel
-- -- for painting/photo manipulation

-- Kexi
-- -- for Access-style database management

(Items for illustration purposes only; not an endorsement of any particular package.)

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[empaler]

-- Kexi
-- -- for Access-style database management
That's the one they're using according to koffice.org. :)

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[Bob The Cowboy]

The link you pointed to shows Pixel is proprietary... I imagine this might be a problem for its inclusion into KOffice (which already includes the much-loved Krita)

Kexi is already the Access-like db-app, and I believe they already use Kivio for their flowcharting app. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I just wanted to point out that they (the KOffice folk) aren't building their own KOffice apps when other KDE apps already exist.

Bill

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[AJWM]

KOffice already has Kivio for flowcharting. QCad strikes me as a bit of overkill for this. It (kivio) could stand to expand its stencil library but it's supposed to support Dia stencils too.

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[speaker of the truth]

What about a Vector graphic editing tool? All tools I've seen except for Flash deal with raster graphics only.

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Karbon, which has seen awesome improvement for 2.0.

Boudewijn Rempt, KOffice Release Dude

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[AJWM]

What about a Vector graphic editing tool?

That would be Karbon14. (KDE seems to have gone through a few iterations of vector graphic tools, or maybe the same tool under different names. I know KIllustrator was renamed because of pressure from Adobe, to Kontour. And there was a Krayon in there too. I don't know how many of these may actually have been different codebases.)

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[speaker of the truth]

Hallelujah! I'll definitely be giving KOffice a chance then (and at the very least using the apps of it that I like).

Boudewijn Rempt, KOffice Release Dude I know the meaning of three of the words, but I'm unsure what you're saying.

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[cmbofh]

He wanted to tell you that he, Boudewijn Rempt, coordinates the upcoming release.

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[Virgil Tibbs]

you havent been using open suse very long....

Re:Extra apps already exist, just converge...

[speaker of the truth]

Aaah thanks. A
  would have helped after his name ;) I thought Buedwijn Rempt was some sort of codename for the next KOffice Release (which seemed odd as everyone is calling to KOffice 2.0)

Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeOffice. OtherOffice. CuteOffice.

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[holloway]

OfficeSweet.

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Less than 500 results on Google too, so KOffice could take it as their own easily :)

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[cmacb]

Because if it doesn't start with a "K" us KDE folk won't recognize it as oK to use.

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but does it run on Windows?

/ducks

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[Provocateur]

Has a nice ring to it, better than *Kough*ice

I wish them luck ...

[golodh]

... but I'm not in the least interested in KOffice.

I got used to Microsoft Office, have switched (with some gripes) to Open Office, and am getting up to speed with it. Works OK under Linux *and* under Windows. The very last thing I need is yet another (half-baked) piece of software reinventing the wheel.

Oh well ... if they really want to, they can develop their KOffice of course. Just don't expect me (or others who just want their office software to "just work" and look the way they are used to) to pay any attention or to respond with anything but mild irritation (can't they think of anything more productive to do?). I'm not even installing it. Not until and unless I see mainstream-press reviews (and no, really no Linux enthousiast reviews: I have seen reviews touting Emacs as a text processor instead of MS Office or Open Office. *sigh*)

Why not focus on really perfecting Open Office? And who knows ... perhaps even adding new worthwhile features to it (the "extensions" come to mind).

Re:I wish them luck ...

[taniwha]

because competition is good - not the 'lets be like' windows sort of competition - the 'ooh look those guys over there are doing something neat, lets see if we can do better' sort - MS is so big they move like a snail on valium these days - a couple of hotshots trying to out do each other is a great thing for all of us

remember that Koffice is not new - here they are announcing their goals for their 2.0 release - I run my company on their spread sheet and the occasional times I need to use a word processor it does what I need

Re:I wish them luck ...

[fimbulvetr]

While I'm sure you enjoy being able to prepare and cook your favorite Peking Duck variation while opening OpenOffice, Koffice will provide competition and hopefully some innovation on the code side which is next to impossible to get into openoffice using your standard submit patches procedures. It can be the coolest and tightest integration/innovation in the entire niche and Sun won't accept it unless you kiss their ass. This, and they accept shitty, buggy internal patches from half assed coders from their own staff (but I repeat myself) all the time. You would welcome this change if you had any idea that OO was just a semi-shiny turd.

Re:I wish them luck ...

[speaker of the truth]

Why not focus on really perfecting Open Office? Because for a lot of people the big point of the GPL is ensuring your code is never used in non-open source software. To work on OOo you must allow your code to be employed in StarOffice, a closed source program.

Re:I wish them luck ...

[MrHanky]

Why on earth would anyone be interested in you? You're far too self-centred to ever become important.

Re:I wish them luck ...

[Marcus Green]

Yes a closed source program that is downloadable as part of the Google pack. So your code goes into a FREE application and into a proprietry application. If you can live with the Sun executives get fat off all those Google pack downloads its not such a downside to contributing to OpenOffice.org.

A nice idea but every time I tried a KDE GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

I experience it as a slow, buggy interface. I'm not talking about 5 years ago (though back then it was really bad. The kcompiler or whatever it was wouldn't even boot up without showstopping errors in a mainstream distro release!), but on something like Mepis or Sabayon from 3 months back.

The computer I have is not the newest, but a P4 2.6 Ghz HT with 2.5GB ram and a good video card should still be responsive. People complain about Gnome, but I'm glad that is Ubuntu's primary desktop - it doesn't feel like it's lagging to show me useless eyecandy, which the KDE desktop seems to be obsessed with, to the point of sacrificing usability.

I think their primary "product" should be polished up first before they boast about making a "faster and leaner" codebase than an established competitor. Don't get me wrong, I like some K software, like Digikam, but it seems too much like MS boasting about their upcoming Zune phone and sneering at the competition.

Re:A nice idea but every time I tried a KDE GUI

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried KDE for a while with no complaints. I don't use it now, but I do use Konqueror fairly often when I need a file browser with thumbnails (lol porn), and it works perfectly. Don't get me wrong, you may have found some way to destroy your performance, but what you're saying sounds nuts to me.

Re:A nice idea but every time I tried a KDE GUI

[smash]

Don't know what drugs you're on, but i'm running KDE on FreeBSD in a VM with only 256mb allocated right now, and it's doing just fine.

As to sacrificing usability... i find stuff like kioslaves far more "usable" than the brain damage that is inflicted by the gnome usability team...

GNOME or other wms

[owlman17]

Will it work on GNOME or Xfce? I'm currently using Icewm. Do you have to install KDE for this one? Or just the KDE libs? (Would still be a large dl even if just the latter.)

Re:GNOME or other wms

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[dlgeek]

Yes, but OpenOffice depends on java. It also is *the* largest package in the Debian archive. I forget the exact size, but just the OO.o packages are several hundred megs.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[QuantumG]

Umm, so? My point is that KOffice most likely doesn't need all that stuff, it's just a granularity issue. The kde libs need to be broken up.. as do basically any library that gets over 5 or 10 meg.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[gambolt]

Compare that to a full OO.org install which drags in Java.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[QuantumG]

Why? I'd rather compare it to the best possible.

It's called the gold standard, and I wish more people would learn it.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Bogtha]

A lot of those packages are simply the individual applications and their supporting data. Once you ignore those, the required supporting packages are simply:

• kdelibs-data, kdelibs4c2a, libarts1c2a - the KDE libraries and sound daemon.
• libavahi-qt3-1 - support library for Rendevous/Bonjour/whatever it's called these days that makes network service autodiscovery work.
• libopenexr2c2a - support library for the EXR image format.
• libpoppler1, libpoppler1-glib, libpoppler1-qt - support library for PDFs.
• libruby1.8 - support library for scripting.
• libwv2-1c2 - support library for Word document format.

The rest of the packages are optional. Furthermore, if you only want a couple of the applications, e.g. KWord, you can install them individually. And of course, on a KDE desktop, you'll already have much of this installed anyway. Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[QuantumG]

What do you need a sound daemon for an office package for?

That should be optional. Same with the network discovery crap.

I don't even *know* what the EXR image format is..

PDF support, yes, fair enough.

Ruby seems like a strange choice for a scripting language for an office package, but ok.

And yes, obviously you want the Word document support.

Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad. But it's not good either.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Bogtha]

What do you need a sound daemon for an office package for?

That should be optional. Same with the network discovery crap.

Blame your distribution. They are optional. Whoever packaged it for your distribution decided that they should be required. I have KOffice installed, and I haven't got all of those packages installed.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[civilizedINTENSITY]

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

Libs? Aren't karbon, kchart, kexi, kformula, kivio,kplato, kpresenter, krita, kspread, kthesaurus, kugar, and kword applications? I mean, would you complain that the MS Office libraries are bloated because you have to instal Word, Excel, Access, & PowerPoint?

Re:GNOME or other wms

[QuantumG]

Well we *were* talking about KOffice, which is a suite of applications. If you only want kword it is:

sudo apt-get install kword
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
    kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kexi koffice-data koffice-libs kspread kword-data
    libarts1c2a libavahi-qt3-1 libopenexr2c2a libruby1.8 libwv2-1c2
Suggested packages:
    fam khelpcenter koffice-doc-html 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:
    kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kexi koffice-data koffice-libs kspread kword
    kword-data libarts1c2a libavahi-qt3-1 libopenexr2c2a libruby1.8 libwv2-1c2
0 upgraded, 13 newly installed, 0 to remove and 114 not upgraded.
Need to get 34.2MB of archives.
After unpacking 110MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[eean]

The libraries are broken up, but its pointless to package them separately. Anyways it would make your apt-get list longer which I suppose would just be terrible.

But really 170 megs for a whole office suite is nothing.

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.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Anonymous Coward]

People just have to accept that you're simply not going to get a fully featured office suite in 20 lines of code.

Deal with it.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody forces you to use KOffice with 11 applications that fit onto 187 MByte of disk space, dude.

Stay happy with OOo, if you are!

Stay happy with its huge Java dependency.

Stay happy with its 5 applications that only fit into 800 MByte of disk space (Java included).

Re:GNOME or other wms

[marcosdumay]

One would need to configure KOffice to run with Gnome sound system. Yeah, ./configure would do it, but it is pre-compiled. I don't know if it can be changed after compilation, probably can, but it is probably quite easyer and less prone to errors to simply install arts.

That's sure to become a classic!

[Anonymous Coward]

My gawd! Your post will surely become a classic. It's rare that we read the works of an author who can bring together simultaneous vomit and explosive diarrhea, yet still write a story that's showcases honor, compassion and respect. Good show, chap!

Re:That's sure to become a classic!

[Just Some Guy]

It already is. The worst part is that it's a true story and I know the guy who wrote that. It made the rounds of our friend circle a few times.

Re:That's sure to become a classic!

[empaler]

I sort of know the feeling he's describing. I was just so lucky to find that the bathroom I had access to was clean and had the sink placed right next to the toilet seat, thus making it easy to purge out of both ends without soiling myself, though getting the godsdamned chunks out of the sinks took some time, using the paper towels available.

Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME API is GTK plus bloat.
KDE API is Qt plus bloat.
I would rather not have apps that are tied to KDE or GNOME.
I would rather Qt use real C++, rather than the moc+C++ stuff.
What's wrong with GTK and C?

Can someone port Koffice to GTK?

Or why not start with AbiWord?

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

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.

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. In the grand scheme of things it is actually very light as far as things it adds to QTs very complete API. For example, it will provide a KPushButton which inherits from the QPushButton class to add a few small integration features. Also KDE offers many common widget combinations as a reusable widget in itself, this is good library design as a whole. Making libraries of reusable code is a GOOD THING.

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.

And what is your general issue with using c++ and moc? I hate to break it to you, but moc IS "real c++". There is nothing wrong with having utilities to generate code, there is huge gain to doing it with moc instead of templates...runtime bindings. moc just hides these details for you, and to be honest, you usually don't even have to worry about it at all if you use the QT build system.

As for what is wrong with GTK + C? Well nothing is wrong with it but it's not the only choice. One thing to keep in mind though is that graphical displays usually consist of conceptual objects "windows", "buttons", "listboxes", "textboxes", etc. These are all "things" which to be honest, creating code to describe "things" is what object oriented programming excels at.

You will never see a port to GTK of KOffice because it would not be a port, but a litteral re-write as the whole code base is built around the KDE/QT libraries.

And why not start with AbiWord? Heh, this statement is a shinning example of a preference not based on the merits of what you want, but instead on an arbitrary dislike for the competition. You are of course entitled to your opinion, nothing is perfect. But you provide no real reason why something built on KDE libraries is inherently bad. Secondly, Abiword is a single word processor application with no integration into an "office solution". KOffice is looking to provide the whole shebang.

I imagine you are going to reply with "KDE is bloated", "KDE is slow". But these generalizations aren't really based on real facts. KDE is actually quite lean (and KDE 4.0 is going to be leaner because QT 4.0 is a vast improvement of 3.0). Its memory usage is nothing crazy, the reason for this is that there is a LOT of code reuse. Using the KDE libraries is effectively "free" as far as memory usage goes because modern operating systems do code sharing of dynamic libraries and the whole damn desktop uses these libraries! There are benchmarks that show that Gnome and KDE are actually quite comparable: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html

I'll even not go so far as to say KDE is better than Gnome in memory usage because I know that there are many factors and a single set of benchmarks by one person doesn't really prove much...but it does show that they are at least in the same ballpark.

All in all, I find your argument against using a modern library not founded in facts :(

proxy

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

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:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Qwavel]

What is wrong with the development tech behind the new KOffice?

Well, speaking as a C++ developer, the first problem is that the new QT is a serious attack on the C++ standard. Yes, I know that everyone will say that the C++ standard is bad and that QT4 has done it better, but that's what the MS people always said when they ignored standards. Standards don't always represent the best solution for you, but sticking to the standard benefits everyone. Now that the QT people have decided to do things their own way some of my C++ skills and all of my C++ code is useless in the KDE world.

So, I doubt I will ever develop using Qt/KDE.

I agree with your point though about C++ being better suited to GUI development then C.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[civilizedINTENSITY]

You do realize that object oriented programming can be done in C?

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[swillden]

Can you elaborate on how Qt3 is an attack on the C++ standard? Note that I'm a C++ programmer of some 17 years, with a fair amount of Qt and some KDE development (as well as a ton of other toolkits), but I haven't looked at Qt4 yet.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

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.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

I don't find it to be an attack on the C++ standard at all. In fact, all of the QT containers have STL compatibility. You can use them with STL style iterators and can use STL algorithms with them as well.

Really the only issue i could possibly see if I were to look at it from your side, then it would be the containers which already have equivalents in the c++ standard library. Well, too be honest, most (all but std::queue/std::stack/std::priority_queue?) don't give protected access to the underlying implementation. This makes the preferable option (inherit and extend) a non-option.

I have always though that it would have been nice if QString inherited from std::wstring or something, but it doesn't, we move on. It's not meant to replace the standard, it's meant to complement it.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

Your point about dependencies is actually a good point. You can however build konsole without arts support. There are many configure options to manage these things, and if you aren't using the whole desktop, well then you probably want to finely tune things a little more than just "./configure"

Oh well, like you said, perhaps kde 4.0 will bring more control over such options.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[G Morgan]

"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."

Who would have thought there would be an argument lacking facts and based on assumptios and preconceived notions on slashdot. Next you'll be telling me people don't read the articles.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[AJWM]

You do realize that object oriented programming can be done in C?

Sure, and it can be done in assembler or possibly even APL too. But why?

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[MemoryDragon]

You do realize that object oriented programming can be done in C? usually you end up in a code bloat mess that way, if you use oo it is always better to use the tool geared for the job instead of trying to use a hammer for everything. The argument that you cannot bind non oo languages to pure is not really true, you just would end up in the same code bloat in those languages you had upfront if you would push oo into functional or procedural languages. But the main advantage is you at least dont have the code bloat on the oo code side of things which reduces pure locs and the number of errors as well as it simplifies the coding interfaces!

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Qwavel]

My issue is with QT4 using it's own alternative to the STL. The STL has become an important part of the C++ library and of most C++ code.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Qwavel]

Yes, the containers and the string. These are fundamental parts of C++. Where-ever possible I use cross-platform code but this code almost always depends on the C++ containers. So now Qt/KDE code is incompatible with regular C++ code. Between that and moc it's like they are trying to put up barriers.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[pherthyl]

I don't really understand that point of view. If you're happy with the stl classes, then use them by all means. The point of the Q classes is that they are much more useful if you're building a modern GUI application. Using them doesn't make you incompatible with c++ code. As has been mentioned, the containers in Qt are compatible with the stl, and you can easily create QStrings from std::strings and vice versa.

So in your application you can use either (although I can't think of a reason to use the stl classes over the Qt ones), and if you're talking to a library, converting types is trivial. Qt is cross platform, so any Qt classes you write will work fine on any platform you want to deploy to. You won't have any advantages by choosing to use the stl classes.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[swillden]

My issue is with QT4 using it's own alternative to the STL. The STL has become an important part of the C++ library and of most C++ code.

Oh, if that's all, then I don't much care. I like the C++ standard library containers, etc., but I've used dozens of such libraries over the years and don't have a problem with using others. The standard libraries are nice in some ways but the Qt libs are nice in other ways (particularly with respect to handling automatic cleanup).

Also, this isn't a particularly large change from Qt3. Qt3 also had its own collection types. Qt4 has improved them, and has added Java5-style iteration (you can still do STL-style iteration if you prefer), but I don't see this as a reason to avoid Qt4. You an still use STL collections if you want, just as you could with Qt3, and you can still use STL-style iteration on Qt4 containers if you want.

Not a big deal, IMO. Actually, I quite like the Java5-style iteration, so I may choose to use Qt collections where I might have chosen to use STL collections (my Qt3 code uses both).

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[pherthyl]

Now that the QT people have decided to do things their own way some of my C++ skills and all of my C++ code is useless in the KDE world.

None of your C++ skills are useless. Anything important you learned about C++ is still applicable when using Qt with C++. Think of Qt as a superset of the features available in C++ and the STL. You can still use all your old stl based code if you want, nothing is forcing you to abandon it. Qt simply provides an alternative that many people find better than the STL.

This is nothing like a Microsoft standards extend and extinguish tactic. It's just another library, like any other library you might use in your project. Your code will interoperate just as well with others whether you use Qt or not.

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[a.d.trick]

As for what is wrong with GTK + C? Well nothing is wrong with it but it's not the only choice. One thing to keep in mind though is that graphical displays usually consist of conceptual objects "windows", "buttons", "listboxes", "textboxes", etc. These are all "things" which to be honest, creating code to describe "things" is what object oriented programming excels at.

To be fair, there is gtkmm and PyGTK which are both awesome ways to do GTK development.

my take on it all

[Anonymous Coward]

i crap on linux. it's trash and those who are devotees to the trash are faggots and idiots.

Re:my take on it all

[SpaceballsTheUserNam]

Bill?

Re:my take on it all

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck. get a set of balls and use a real unix instead of being a shill. common fucking bullshit from the linux camp. what else could we expect from a bunch of faggots and wannabes?

Re:my take on it all

[Hucko]

Vague drivel in the form of vulgarities and petty name calling?

Re:my take on it all

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck. get a set of balls and use a real unix instead of being a shill.

Does your mom count? Because I already used her.

A few thoughts...

[Cryophallion]

From TFS:

It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool.

I know I am setting myself up for something here, but isn't BASE an access-like database creator?

I just hope that they don't feel the need to go with K based names. Such as KIM (K image manipulator), Kase (K database), Ksql (Ksicle, kind of like popsicle), etc.

On the other hand, if it has new features, I'm all for it. I, and many others I'm sure, just want something that JUST WORKS. I don't care if it KDE, GTK, so on and so forth. I will go where the features and stability is. And that is the only way to spread FOSS - by getting a true alternative to the other programs that infect corporate culture (and from there, to schools so they can prep for corporate culture, then to homes). If it takes multiple projects to stir each other along, then fine. But if one can do just as well for ease of selection, fine too. Just lose the egos and do what is best for everyone - not just your baby project.

Freedom is not the most important criterion

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Choice between two or three broken apps is not as important as having at least one very good app that works well.

Multi-platform is vital for helping a transition off MS and onto Linux or whatever. I use OO to edit docs and it just does not matter to me whether I use Windows or Linux. In essence all I care about is that it is an OO-capable machine.

Re:That's all good. Except...

[Anonymous Coward]

Print selection? That's the stupidest fucking thing I've heard since I've been at Microsoft.

You can't live without this?

To Koffice marketing

[postmortem]

reguster domain coffice.com and enjoy the growth.

Native Mac Version

[javacowboy]

KOffice 2.0 will run natively on OS X:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/02/1930232

This will benefit Mac users tremendously, as NeoOffice is too bloated (although making good progress at getting more efficient) and the native version of OpenOffice is probably several months away at best.

There is no lean, simple free and/or open source spreadsheet app for Mac yet. When KOffice 2.0 comes out, cheap Mac users (like me) will have more choice. When MS Office 2007 comes out for Mac in January 2008 (sorry, had to poke fun at Microsoft :D ), and iWork 2008 out starting last month, Mac users willing to pay for a good office suite will have even more choice.

This will also benefit the KDE team, as their installed based will expand by one (and possibly two) OS's, giving them more bug reports and feature requests.

Everybody wins!

Re:Native Mac Version

[IHSW]

Actually, it's MS Office 2008 for Mac. Granted, poking fun is always great, but your poking is just baseless. :P

FYI, all "MS Office for Mac" software is released a year later than "MS Office for Windows", despite MS Office origins as Mac software.

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:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[stinerman]

I'd drop OO.o for "GNOME Office" (if a general collection of programs can be called an office suite), but the functionality is lacking. The PDF output plugin for Abiword created docs that were readable only by Abiword. I'm sure I missed out on a few job opportunities there.

OO.o does what I need for now. Until KOffice is released with GTK+ widgets, then I'm afraid that I'm going to keep away from it. I simply can't stand KDE anything.

But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[golodh]

This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.

And if the task to be done, spreadsheeting and writing documents, letters, and reports is known, then where is the percentage of redoing the whole thing from scratch?

There is a very good reason why MS Office has such a high marketshare: it does the job, without too much fuss, and people are comfortable with it. What job? Well ... day-to-day office jobs. In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package. Open Office is competitive, KOffice (in my opinion) is (in my view at least) redundant.

Err and when you say you "run your company" on the KOffice spreadsheet, how big an application are you talking about? Anything beyond a straightforward 1-page spreadsheet? Any scripting? Any pulling in of external datafiles? Any graphing? Any database access?

Re:But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[lahvak]

This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.

True, the task is well known and it hasn't changed much, but it has never been solved well. With every new release of every office suit in existence, I hear that their new version does things "the right way". I get my hopes up, give it a try, and so far I have been always completely disappointed. Now I am hearing that the new Office is supposed to be good, I didn't have chance to try it yet, but my experience tells me it is probably not going to be what they claim it to be.

Re:But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[steveoc]

I really beg to differ with you in so many fundamental ways.

Firstly - MS-Office, for a start, gained a high market share by the simple fact that all of the competing products were systematically removed from the market as options, and their manufacturers sent to the wall through highly dubious tactics. Thats just for starters.

MS-Office maintains a high market share by the simple fact that the data that it spits out is in an undocumented (and ever changing) format, so competing implementations are not even possible to produce.

After having established this monopoly position, workers in the average office who are stuck with this MS-Crap are now limited in what functions they can perform, as defined by the way that this software operates. NOT the other way around as you so boldly assert. In your world, where "In about 20 year nobody has really identified any additional core functionality they needed over spreadsheet, text-processor, presentation maker, personal database, simple drawing package." .. there is no need for the internet, there is no need for web based collaborative workflow software, there is no need for any future innovations at all.

20 years of stagnation is the best way to describe the awful dystopia that you appear to be stuck in. I live in a totally different world (thank God), where each 'office worker' can do the job of 10 of your MS-Office using worker drones, and do most of it in their lunch break.

Secondly, ODF exists primarily to ensure that documents created by offices and governments the world over can finally be stored in a future proof format that is well defined, and open to competing implementations and extensions. If you cant even begin to see the 'percentage' in that, then you are as intellectually stagnant as those same people you describe who 'choose' MS-Office because it is 'good enough and gets the job done'.

To be fair on you though, I have seen many of your other posts, and you are no dummy, but your knowledge of the real history of this industry is understandably lacking. Id be curious to know exactly what you have been directly exposed to in terms of development over that last 20 year period ?

Thirdly - REINVENTING the wheel is like - having a well defined international standard for office document storage, such as ODF, and inventing something from scratch that attempts to address the same issue, albeit in a completely incompatible way (such as 'inventing' OOXML). Another one would be having something that is open and internationally embraced (such as TCP/IP and the internet) .. and then deciding that it should be scrapped in favour of your own closed and broken idea called 'MSN'**. I agree that reinventing the wheel is both bad and stupid.

KOffice 2.0 with ODF support is yet another implementation of the wheel, not a reinvention of the wheel.

In this case the wheel remains a wheel, and there are multiple code bases which compete to be better implementations of that wheel. That is a good thing. The documents can be freely used between multiple implementations, regardless of who wrote the code.

Thinking along the lines of 'OpenOffice already implements ODF, therefore we dont need anything other than OpenOffice' is a bad trap to fall into. Thats the same line of reasoning that PHB management falls into when they think that if the software is currently working, then its a waste of time rewriting and refactoring code after the event.

Having competing from-the-ground-up rewrites all converging on a published standard of functionality .. means that ODF has well and truly won the Office format wars already. How many projects out there have announced that they will be 100% compatible with OOXML for example ? err .. not many Id guess.

The emotional attachment to crusty old code bases is a trap. When you fall into that trap, your product stagnates, and your future options for improving your product grow dim. Do it for too long, and you star

Re:But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[speaker of the truth]

This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years. Right, but there's a small problem in your logic. KOffice was first released in 1998, 2 years before OOo would be released in an OSS license. OOo was instead created (first as simply a writer program) in 1984 under a proprietary license and was only released as OSS in 2000. So here the obvious choice wouldn't be to have people develop OOo but instead KOffice as it was around in a OSS format earlier. However the advantage to using OOo instead of KOffice was Sun got people to develop their proprietary StarOffice for free (and still do) and it also allowed a new OSS office suite on a mature codebase (whether or not it was better then KOffice at the time I do not know).

Re:But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[speaker of the truth]

Exactly every Microsoft Office product has been buggy and had its quirks (OOo also has bugs as well as lacking certain features that Microsoft Office has). Its GUI also isn't intuitive at times and can be difficult to remember how to use after long breaks. Until an Office Suite comes out that doesn't have these problems, we'll continue to need more office suites. And after these problems are finally dealt with (if ever), I imagine more features will be thought up.

Re:But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[civilizedINTENSITY]

And here I thought it had to do with illegally leveraging their desktop monopoly. In terms of "too much fuss", have you seen anyone trying to use ribbons for the first time? With only office 2007 and openoffice installed, (and after people reach the point of throwing things,) openoffice "just works".

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:Please try my database libraries / app

[siddesu]

yay perl. if it has DBIx::Class support (or one can be rigged easily) i'm sold. i'll look it over the weekend, thanks for the plug :-D

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

It doesn't current have DBIx::Class support ( as I've never used DBIx::Class ), but I'm open to using it as long as it doesn't break backwards compatibility. I'll investigate.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to have to change the name, Mike Rowe.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Steauengeglase]

"I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now."

I think you are a little late to the party. Didn't Access commit suicide like 5 years ago?

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[caseih]

Excellent news. I wonder how hard it would be to write, say, FreeBASIC wrappers for the perl API. Most people coming from Access are not going to be very experienced with or keen on perl, but they are familiar with VBA, and FreeBASIC would be at least remotely familiar to them. I use python almost exclusively myself and would love to have libraries like yours for developing rapid database GUI apps. I remember a while back a Qt-based app that used python for RAD database development. It was commercial I think.

Is the Kexi project (supposedly an Access killer too) part of KOffice?

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[PCM2]

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.

Hmmmm. Let's see ... implement my system in Access... or implement it in Perl. Implement it in Access ... or implement it in Perl. Access. Or Perl. Access. Perl. Damn, I'm going to need a couple beers to figure this one out.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

I wonder how hard it would be to write, say, FreeBASIC wrappers for the perl API. Most people coming from Access are not going to be very experienced with or keen on perl, but they are familiar with VBA, and FreeBASIC would be at least remotely familiar to them.

Well ... um ... you can't mix Perl and FreeBASIC, as far as I know. Nor do I really want to, and I'm certainly not rewriting the whole thing in Basic ... certainly not ...

You're correct that a lot of Access users want to continue using some form of Basic. But this is only because they don't know better. I think they should leave basic behind, and gravitate to a more powerful language such as Perl - obviously this is why I chose Perl myself. Perl has an incredible developer community, a gazillion libraries on cpan, and is rock solid on pretty much any platform. FreeBASIC is an interesting project to scratch a questionable itch, but I don't really consider it a target for my software. Sorry - no offense or anything.

What I plan on doing instead is offering 'macro' type functions, like Access does, so that people can hook things together in the GUI without doing any coding.

I use python almost exclusively myself and would love to have libraries like yours for developing rapid database GUI apps.

I had a quick look at Python, and got turned off by the anal 'thou must indent thy code THUS!' idea, and decided Perl was the way to go. Also, the Python GTK bindings seem to lag slightly behind the Perl ones. I suppose this isn't so much an issue now that things have stabalised somewhat, but when I first started, there was a LOT of functionality that was just landing that I wanted to take advantage of immediately ( such as using treemodels in combos ), and it seemed to make sense to go with Perl for this reason as well. Plus I already had a little experience with Perl from a long time back. But anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to port everything to Python ( apart from PDF::ReportWriter ... which relies heavily on PDF::API2 - maybe you could use Cairo? ). All my code is heavily documented and stuff, not like most of the Perl I come across.

remember a while back a Qt-based app that used python for RAD database development. It was commercial I think.

Rekall. Yeah I tried it out ( see the 'why' link on my webpage ). For starters, it used Python ( see above ). Secondly, it used QT, which wasn't open-source ( for commercial developers ) at the time, and also I've never liked QT ( personal taste ). But more importantly, they seemed to be going off in too many directions at once, but nothing really worked well . They seemed to start with the GUI, and build stuff underneath it. I went the other way around, and completed the libraries, and now I'm getting to the GUI.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

Didn't Access commit suicide like 5 years ago?

:)

Actually, it was basically abandoned after Access 2.0. What's been added since then ( apart from Product Activation )?.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Tablizer]

Actually, it was basically abandoned after Access 2.0.

Microsoft does not want to improve MS-Access because that would cut into SQL-Server sales. In an old FAQ of theirs, they suggested purchasing MS-SQL-Server if one reached concurrency or file size problems. After MS wiped out or bought out the competition (FoxPro, dBASE, Paradox, etc.) they were only competing with themselves.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[chthon]

Suggesting Perl to people who come from Basic is going a little too far. Why not Python or Ruby ?

B.t.w. while I have been programming in Perl seven years now, I still hate the syntax.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[oliderid]

Don't take it as a critic. I simply wonder why you need an access like application on Linux. You can find gems like MySQL, PostgreSQL and others?
Because they are more simple to use for an office application?

Anyway the PDF report writer looks like a very good idea.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Writing an Access-killer with Perl is like building a house with a swiss army knife. Can be done, but there are better tools for either purpose.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[MajinBlayze]

From Wikipedia.com

Kexi is a component of KOffice with large contributions coming since early 2003 from OpenOffice Polska company. It works under Linux/Unix, Mac OS X (using Fink), Solaris, and the Microsoft Windows operating systems; although the Windows version is neither free of cost ("freeware") nor Open Source. An open source version is set to release with KDE 4. /blockquote

I only just realized it's open source on linux (I had assumed it was closed source on all platforms), so I cannot vouch for it's features, however, I used to be an "access programmer"*, so I would like to see how it compares. You can script in python or ruby. I assume it's forms are based on qt.

*: I now work at a great company as a real sql developer/junior dba, and love every second of it. It was worth the torture of working with access for my early database experience.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[MajinBlayze]

Noooo! should have previewed! should have looked like this:
From Wikipedia.com

Kexi is a component of KOffice with large contributions coming since early 2003 from OpenOffice Polska company. It works under Linux/Unix, Mac OS X (using Fink), Solaris, and the Microsoft Windows operating systems; although the Windows version is neither free of cost ("freeware") nor Open Source. An open source version is set to release with KDE 4.

I only just realized it's open source on linux (I had assumed it was closed source on all platforms), so I cannot vouch for it's features, however, I used to be an "access programmer"*, so I would like to see how it compares. You can script in python or ruby. I assume it's forms are based on qt.

*: I now work at a great company as a real sql developer/junior dba, and love every second of it. It was worth the torture of working with access for my early database experience.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[KermodeBear]

His product is more than just a database app. It is also a form builder on top of that and some other things, so that you can easily and rapidly build data driven applications without the need of advanced programming knowledge. If his application lives up to its promises then that would be great.

The screen shots look nice, and it is comforting to know that it has been in active use in a production environment for over two years - and, according to the site, it works on Windows and OSX as well.

On a personal note, I'm disappointed that it is written in Perl and the author thinks that Python has some "very strange ideas" such as "everything is an object" (OO languages aren't strange anymore). Makes me scared of what the code looks like underneath, but honestly, if it works and works WELL than I don't really care unless I have to dig in and change something. (o:

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Bluesman]

Perl's a natural fit for people who already know BASIC -- lots of $ all over, doesn't enforce any particular programming style, not particularly object oriented, etc.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

On a personal note, I'm disappointed that it is written in Perl and the author thinks that Python has some "very strange ideas" such as "everything is an object" (OO languages aren't strange anymore). Makes me scared of what the code looks like underneath, but honestly, if it works and works WELL than I don't really care unless I have to dig in and change something. (o:

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 ... to format their code in the way they like. The mere fact that they are doing this suggests that there are differing styles of formatting. Great. Now I openly admit that I have my own code formatting conventions, and they're not exactly like other Perl programmers. To be honest, I probably format my code a lot more like a Python programmer! BUT, and this is important ... I absolutely insist that I be allowed to format my code how I want, and not how someone else has decreed. I insist. And if the Python developers want to be so anal about their preferred code formatting, then they're lost my interest. It's as simple as that. None of this has anything to do with OO programming. It's about formatting. It's not the most important issue when choosing a language, but it rubbed me up the wrong way when I was investigating languages, whereas Perl seemed to fit like an old glove. So bye-bye Python.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[JanneM]

Just run KOffice under Gnome. It's not like either the KDE nor Gnome libraries are particularly large or anything by today's standards; the resource requirements of a large app (or just the Java vm) is totally dominant by comparison.

That said, for wp I much prefer Abiword; it's not nearly as full-featured, of course, but apart from the lack of real handling of Japanese fonts and input (it works but is a hassle since you need to switch to a capable font manually) it does everything I ever use. Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet of the ones I've tried, and Inkscape is also plenty good enough (though not without its problems of course).

The one thing I'm missing is a presentation app. And no, Impress is not, well, impressive. You breathe at the wrong time and the thing drops your formatting, or destroys half your slides, or just refuses to work in several dozen unintuitive, frustrating ways. Seriously, drop the thing. Start over. It's hideous. That is one area were I actually prefer the hassle of using Powerpoint on my secondary machine at work rather than doing it on my main computer.

The presentation issue is really frustrating actually. No solution is really there yet. If, for instance, Inkscape had more solid text tools (so the association between text and a frame was actually stable for instance, and so you could flow text from one frame to another) you could make slides there for instance, but as it is, it's not good enough.

Does Koffice stand up to openoffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Koffice because its a one stop shop for anything I might need, but I think Openoffice would perform better in a business setting (Kword vs Openoffice writer). Some of the applications not included with Openoffice, but normally installed with like GIMP and Inkscape are much more mature than Krita and Karbon14, which haven't gotten much love as of late. KDE got several projects for Koffice in Summer of code, the results look great.

Re:That's all good. Except...

[oyenstikker]

I print selection more often than I print [the whole document].

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[dbIII]

What a lot of people miss is that you can run the kde apps on gnome and vice versa. You can run Koffice without changing anything else. Both gnome and KDE have good and bad points. I have a few people stuck on base RHEL3 at the insistance of the vendor of a commercial app that needs a lot of support and with that release gnome is very unstable so those users are on KDE. More recent versions of gnome are a lot better and people run a variety of kde applications on their gnome desktops.

My office will be even -better-.

[tjstork]

In 2009, I will ship my office suite, Stork Office. It will be fully open source, be even leaner than koffice, and not have the stupid Access-like tools. Then, if KDE isn't finished their 4.0 desktop, and fix the register view in KDevelop, I may just write my own GUI and IDE to go with it, for release in 2009. Oh, and I'll have Duke Nukem Forever as a game that ships with my system!

Re:My office will be even -better-.

[nutbar]

But how clean will your codebase be? Because that's the killer feature that is going to make me drop Microsoft Office!

Re:My office will be even -better-.

[tjstork]

But how clean will your codebase be? Because that's the killer feature that is going to make me drop Microsoft Office!

My codebase will be so clean, you can eat off of it. I won't have a single dirty keyword in the whole thing!

as well as

[Anonymous Coward]

katchy name?

I can see the tag-line now

[L4m3rthanyou]

"At least it's not OpenOffice!"

Last time I used KOffice, it messed up the letter spacing and made my paper hard to read when printed. If they fixed that, I'd probably use it. I'm still using M$ office because I just can't stand using OpenOrifice.

Re:I can see the tag-line now

[MORB]

Yeah, font kerning was a big issue in koffice 1.x - and from what little research I did, the issue was in Qt so I figure they couldn't solve it easily without writing their own text renderer from scratch, and since Qt4 was around the corner, they decided to skip that.

I look forward to koffice 2.0 - I don't need to produce text based documents often, but when I do, I could really do without having to use OOo.

Blaargag!

[WurdBendur]

It may be leaner, faster and cleaner than Open Office, but KDE will still be sitting in its lap, right in the way of your productivity.

Re:Blaargag!

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be worse... Imagine if it relied in a braindead desktop like Gnome?

Access

[rduke15]

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?

I cannot quite understand how you cannot see what Access is used for. When you need a databse application with a GUI, what do you build the GUI with? HTML? That's fine for many tings, as the web demonstrates. But for a real desktop GUI application, what do you suggest instead of Access? Perl/Tk? C++? Visual Basic?

Despite it's horrible VBA scripting, Access is a great tool to build GUI frontend applications. In fact, I think Access is the main reason why many people cannot move from Windows to Mac or Linux. They have a vital Access application, and there is no easy way to replace it. I have several clients with such applications. In some instances, I moved the data to PostgreSQL on a Linux server, but the forms are still in Access.

I'm very much looking forward to an Access alternative.

Re:Access

[kyofunikushimi]

Ah, thank you. I've always dealt with situations for which an HTML interface was well suited.

Re:Access

[dtecmeister]

Another great reason for an Access replacement is to be able to improve on it. Access is very good for quickly making front-ends, but it has many areas that could be improved on. This is an excellent opportunity for a killer app. to step in and fill the gaps.

Re:Access

[vandan]

Try my project as as Access replacement:

http://entropy.homelinux.org/. I'm also working on a new website ( with updated screenshots and also snapshots of the libraries ), at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_new.

It's written in Perl, and uses Gtk2 for the GUI. It's open-source and cross-platform, and soon will get a GUI object builder ( click the 'future' link for some screenshots ).

Re:Access

[davidsyes]

Lotus Approach is what you can ask for. Access is TOO developer-centric after basic forms creation. Lotus Approach was designed with END USERS in mind. That said, it is not as POWERFUL as Access, but it's MUCH easier, and the user base is crafty enough to devise ways of using the built-in code to do things the developers never even considered possible or worth pursuing. If **only** IBM would share its Approach code base (at least the parts that aren't patented not owned by IBM) with KDE.or, then Lotus Approach would once again get fresh air.

A few things Approach could use, if KDE.or copies Approach (instead of say, Kexi or similar but not as flexible/friendly):

-- horizontal sliders for the detail tables
-- better, more flexible relationship/table linking diagram (needs a better ERD)
-- web/html production/save-as that is better than what Approach currently has
-- Run-time executable/binary
-- multi-user collaboration in real-time for not just record-level locking, but row and cell-level locking for better end-user multi-access capability
-- more flexible and more non-modal dialog boxes during browse AND design
-- updated charts
-- .....

Re:Access

[davidsyes]

PLEASE, PLEASE look at Lotus Approach. The interface is crisp, thin, lean, flexible, and feature-rich. IT should be the envy of Open Source developers who are designing for END-USER accession, not developing for geeks or nerds or power-user-going-programmer. The database application needs to have WOW factor for end-users.

I cannot ENOUGH implore you to look at Lotus Approach. It is not separately available, but it is part of Lotus SmartSuite, which exists in several versions, the older ones being about $25 and have about 99% of the features of the more current, $300 version, but have a few bugs that are addressed in the newer version.

If Lotus Approach, or even Lotus SmartSuite ever became ported to Linux, I'd REALLY consider giving BOTH my pinkie fingers in joy.

Please, will you developers dump the "not-invented-here" syndrome and develop for END-USERS? Next, look at Lotus Word Pro. It's got tabs (division and sections) and multiple, useful live print previews that are NOT in ms word nor in OO.o, not even in StarOffice.

It breaks my heart that Linux developers do not seem to know of nor care about the polished, end-user-studies-aimed Lotus SmartSuite feature set.

Re:Access

[vandan]

PLEASE, PLEASE look at Lotus Approach. The interface is crisp, thin, lean, flexible, and feature-rich.

HUH? I found some screenshots. Approach reminds me of Access, and not a recent Access, but v2.0 of it. Trust me, leave this garbage behind. Gtk2 has *much* better UI design, including dropping the tired fixed-positioning in favour of dynamically resizing widgets, which really makes a huge difference.

Obviously I haven't actually *used* Approach, because:

a) I don't have a Windows PC
b) I'm not interested in Windows-only software
c) I don't need to pay anyone money for database software - my own suits my needs perfectly

But anyway, the looks didn't impress me. Admittedly I couldn't actually find screenshots on the software's official homepage, but I found one on a wikipedia page.

Also others have noted, giving end-users the ability to create database forms is a recipe for disaster. My target market is other developers.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[greenguy]

I haven't missed that (JanneM, take note). I've done it... I just wasn't that impressed with KOffice as it is currently. It isn't bad, it just isn't better than OOo, and it doesn't yet support ODF. That's why I have high hopes for 2.0, because I'd love to have a cross-platform suite that supports ODF.

Heck, I hardly use an office suite at all. I spend most of my time in Firefox, Scribus, and Inkscape. My officemates, on the other hand, use Word and/or Excel all day, every day. It's really them I need to convince. I'm happy with Google Docs.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[Falstius]

I'm going to try prosper for my next presentation. I've given up on WYSIWYG document creation.

ODF-support

[Anonymous Coward]

> KOffice is not yet fully compatible with ODF but the claim is that 2.0 will be.

Where is that written? In fact Sebastian says;

"KOffice has already transitioned to OpenDocument Format (ODF) by default and while it is not yet fully compatible with the standard, it is being worked on."

and it makes sense to don't promise something OpenOffice.org itself did not reached yet (that's 100% compatibility with what is written in the ODF specs). This is a long time goal and the message seems to be, that KOffice does not lose that focus even if there will be probably soon a MSOOXML "ISO-Standard".

Ok, well, you know the rule

[WindBourne]

You have to change your login from greenguy to kreenkuy.

Re:That's all good. Except...

[rduke15]

I actually knew someone who definitely needed "print selection". He had never heard of the concept of files, much less folders. He had ONE Word document on his Mac desktop, and only ever typed into that. Then he would select the part he needed and print that. I'm not kidding! Luckily, I was in a hurry and was able to refrain from getting into helping him. Anyway, he didn't want or need help. I have no idea how it ended, and whether eventually someone showed him the light. But maybe he wouldn't have been interested. It worked for him, with all his writings in a single huge Word file...

slightly offtopic ... but

[siddesu]

while i was mostly kidding, DBIx::Class is a neat ORM framework. you may want to take a look at how it is integrated into the Catalyst framework -- it is quite a pleasure to use the combination.

That's the right way to improve software

[golodh]

I think you are doing this the right way: start with the task you need done, see how existing software measures up, note where it falls short.

I'm sorry to hear that current Office software fails you. Now if you could only describe how and why the software you use doesn't measure up to your expectations that might be valuable input for developers.

But it's a totally different approach from the gushing: "Gee lets redo the whole darn thing, lets code the interface in Qt4 and gosh lets rejoice over what a nice quick application we have" approach we see with KOffice. Sure, Open Office is slow. But as long as the it processes my keystrokes faster than I can type them what's the rush?

I still feel that KOffice is a "me-too" thing that starts at the wrong end of the problem ... and hence is a largely unproductive use of time and effort.

Re:That's the right way to improve software

[Anonymous Coward]

Do realize that KOffice was around before StarOffice was bought and opensourced by Sun. When it was started, the only other free software office suites where Andrew and Siag -- and neither of them really offered any base to build something great on.

Boudewijn Rempt, KOffice release dude.

Yet Another Mousetrap?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I want to do is type up my paper and save it in a format that my professor's copy of Microsoft Word can read without any hassles. OpenOffice does that, and I didn't have to buy it (which freed up a year's worth of Ramen money). If I didn't have OpenOffice, I'd have skipped the pallet of noodles and bought MS-Office. I'd have also probably starved, but my papers would be done and turned in.

Invent something new to make the world better.
The office suite mousetrap has already been built.

Re:Yet Another Mousetrap?

[Ash-Fox]

All I want to do is type up my paper and save it in a format that my professor's copy of Microsoft Word can read without any hassles.

Kword supports saving in Microsoft Write format which Microsoft Word supports.

Re:Yet Another Mousetrap?

[meringuoid]

All I want to do is type up my paper and save it in a format that my professor's copy of Microsoft Word can read without any hassles. OpenOffice does that

That's a whole lot of bloat to install just to type up a paper. Try AbiWord.

Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

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.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[Ash-Fox]

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.

I want a good office suite with a decent interface. I don't care about Microsoft's ooxml, there is a few applications on sourceforge than convert ooxml to odt format and vise versa.

I am sick of developers wasting their time trying to catch up with Microsoft's flaws, being distracted from bigger problems.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Or Novell:
http://download.novell.com/SummaryFree.jsp?buildid=ESrjfdE4U58~

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[ThePhilips]

What prevents you from asking people to resend you the document in readable form?

It might take 15-20 minutes - but many "dumb" users are pretty happy to learn how to save document in any other format e.g. PDF.

If you would tell them the PDFs (or even HTMLs) can be read under Linux and Mac OS (or any other OS) and that it is document format suitable for data preservation, they would be really eager to learn.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[HyperQuantum]

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.

People who are using a pre-2007 version of MS Office are facing the same problem. If someone sends you an OOXML file you just say "I cannot read this file, please use a more common file format".

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

The response I usually get with that approach -- if I get a response at all -- is "I've upped my version, up yours!"

Most users aren't interested in anything but the shortest path to getting their work done. Having to select a different file type than the default every time they save is beyond the effort they're willing to put forth. We who don't use the de facto standard are the oddballs, we are the ones who have to adapt, we are the ones who NEED A SOLUTION THAT CAN OPEN OOXML.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

there is a few applications on sourceforge than convert ooxml to odt format and vise versa.

Links, please? I searched sf.net for ooxml and found nothing of the sort.

You might be sick of the developers trying to catch up with Microsoft, but more than 90% of of my customer base uses their office file formats. My livelihood depends on being able to read the files they send me.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

The odfconverter-1.0.0-2.oxt file works only with Windows, and the odf-converter-1.0.0-5.i586.rpm file works only on SUSE® Linux Enterprise, SUSE Linux, and openSUSE. On both platforms, the OpenXML Translator works only with the latest Novell® edition of OpenOffice.org.

Well, it's a start. Shame it's not available for OpenOffice.org on any other distro.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[Ash-Fox]

Without really looking at the projects, here are the first five results in the search I did:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/odftranslator/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooo-word-filter/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooconvert/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooo-convertor/

I appologize if some aren't converters but as I said, I didn't really look to deeply, those are just the first five search results.

I'm sure you can find more yourself.

You might be sick of the developers trying to catch up with Microsoft, but more than 90% of of my customer base uses their office file formats.

If you depend so much on Microsoft formats, you should use Microsoft Office, period. There is no point using OpenOffice.org to open Microsoft documents, since Microsoft Office will always open them the way they're meant to be displayed and edit them perfectly.

Please remember, the goal for OpenOffice.org is not "Free Microsoft Office clone".

I'm sorry, but there is no way around this. From a design point of view, it's improbable for me to even conceive OpenOffice.org will ever be able to display the documents exactly as Microsoft Office displays them.

Not only that, but because the OpenOffice.org interface is so limited and primitive in certain areas. It's impossible to even translate certain layouts that are used in Microsoft Documents to OpenOffice.org. So, even from supporting Microsoft Documents point of view.. The interface needs to be worked on.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

These projects are all odf converters, mostly MS Office plugins. They do not make it possible to open OOXML in anything other than MS Office.

Re:Can it open OOXML files?

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Actually the System Requirements are disingenuous. Novell want you to use their desktop, but I can confirm that the RPM works fine on Gentoo with at least the AMD64 versions of the standard OOo 2.2 and 2.3.

It also provides a stand alone program that should solve the problem for anything that supports ODF.

It is also BSD licensed so the are no license issues, at least for those of us lucky enough to live in a country that dose not recognize software patents.

n.b The license also covers redistributing the source if anyone knows where it is?

Its all good!

[mlwmohawk]

This is what standards are all about, [N] groups using 1 standard makes for *competition* may the best ideas win!!

Re:Its all good!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, standards are about making [N] different groups with different ideas conform to [1] useless, outdated-by-the-time-the-ink-has-dried, piece of documentation, written by people with no concept of what is happenning in the real world.

There, fixed that for you.

The reason why MS and their XML standard for office documents will ALWAYS win, is because they innovate, rather than being tied to a single specification.

I remember the debacle with Firefox when it first came out, and how the rendering was godawful. Their justification was "we followed w3c standard number blah blah".

While, at the same time, MSIE just worked.

People don't care about standards (when WILL you people wake up ?). They care about things that work as they expect them to.

Your science paper written in Open Office, that can be saved as an MS Write format, and then read by your professor in MS Word. When he adds some comments to the bottom, is he going to then save it back in MS Write format for you ? Chances are, no ... and then your Open Office becomes another piece of s**t, as it can't re-open the file again.

People want things that just work ... if that means making it read AND write native .doc format, then that is what it must do ... none of this import as, export as crap ... life is too short.

cut out the crap

[m2943]

I would use more KDE applications if they didn't insist on starting up half the KDE desktop environment, starting up slowly, and printing all that crap. I don't want "kio" or "ksycoca" or whatever running in the background just because I'm editing a text file. And often,

Why the hell can't KDE (and Gnome, for that matter) do this stuff in-process?

Re:cut out the crap

[Ash-Fox]

I would use more KDE applications if they didn't insist on starting up half the KDE desktop environment

The point of this is to decrease memory usage by sharing common features between KDE applications. I personally prefer KDE as it is.

Re:cut out the crap

[m2943]

I personally prefer KDE as it is.

See the title? "KOffice as OpenOffice competitor"? If KOffice wants to be an OpenOffice competitor, it shouldn't drag half the KDE desktop with it.

The point of this is to decrease memory usage by sharing common features between KDE applications.

It increases memory for people who aren't running KDE. Actually, I think it's just bad design even for KDE. (Gnome contains similar stupidity.)

Re:cut out the crap

[Ash-Fox]

See the title? "KOffice as OpenOffice competitor"? If KOffice wants to be an OpenOffice competitor, it shouldn't drag half the KDE desktop with it.

KOffice's homepage names the goal however, "KOffice is a free, integrated office suite for KDE, the K Desktop Environment."

I believe it can be a competitor to OpenOffice.org despite it's dependencies. It's not much worse than OpenOffice.org having a dependency on Java, Microsoft Office 2007 having a dependency on .net and Windows. Infact in my opinion it's better because KDE exposes a lot of great features like kioslaves (Which Linux, OS X, Windows and their gui toolkits etc. do not support natively), low memory usage if you use other KDE applications too.

It increases memory for people who aren't running KDE.

Substantially? I don't think it makes that much of a major difference in memory if the application has the features supported internally to be honest.

Re:cut out the crap

[smash]

You see, the reason they load all that crap is because usually you would use them from within KDE - and ALL the kde processes would be using the same copys of kio, etc.

We're not in 1995 any more. Invest in more than 128mb of RAM (i'd suggest 2gb - it's cheap and makes a difference) and just run KDE if you regularly run KDE apps, or gnome if you run gnome apps.

Am posting this from within a FreeBSD vm running KDE in 256mb, and it's perfectly usable...

Competition?

[HairyNevus]

They're competing over which free word processor get the most downloads? What do they have to gain? At least OO.org and Lotus Symphony have .exes on their site. KOffice is gonna miss a huge chunk of the Windows market when users are presented with tarballs.

Re:Competition?

[ClamIAm]

From the first paragraph of TFA:

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Flame on :)

Re:Competition?

[HairyNevus]

Yeah, it works on Windows. But without a clear .exe labeled "setup" most Windows users aren't gonna know what to do. Way to RMFC.

Re:Competition?

[ClamIAm]

I didn't realize KOffice 2.0 was out already. Oh wait, it isn't. Stop with the (flamebait-ish) speculation.

Re:That's all good. Except...

[speaker of the truth]

I've never heard of such a thing and I've used Word all my life (just checked and sure enough there it is). I've always put stuff on its own page and printed those page(s).

What about stablity?

[Anonymous Coward]

New features, new codebase, cleaner, leaner -- all nice and stuff. But will it be more stable than it's now? At the moment, I'm still using abiword/gnumeric because the damn thing keeps eating my files. I'd LOVE to just have the current koffice, only stable...

The most important question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it be ported to Windows?

I ask, tongue firmly in cheek, but the point is valid: how come there's so much pressure to port Windows apps to Linux, but the reverse is almost unheard of?

Re:The most important question.

[Ash-Fox]

Will it be ported to Windows?

If you RTFA, you would know the answer.

PDF to ODF conversion

[bdubSOv1iKIJ403M]

Converting a PDF document into an editable form is like taking a screenshot of slashdot and trying to reconstruct what the HTML and CSS was.

Postscript, the precurser to PDF, is basically a layout system; draw a string here, draw a string there, etc. It is very good at preserving layout. However, some information is lost. Consider an embedded table, for instance. In the original document, a table might be defined with

-table
    -row
        -Firstname
        -Lastname
      -row
          Jack
          Bauer
      -row
          Anonymous
          Coward
-endtable

Once converted to pdf, it might be represented by

Drawline(200,200,400,200)
Drawline(200,300,400,300)
Drawline(200,400,400,400)
Drawline(200,500,400,500)

Drawline(200,200,200,400)
Drawline(300,200,300,400)
Drawline(400,200,400,400)

PaintString("Firstname", 200,400)
PaintString("Lastname", 300,400)
PaintString("Jack", 200, 300)
PaintString("Bauer", 300, 300)
PaintString("Anonymous", 200, 200)
PaintString("Coward", 300, 200)

Re:That's all good. Except...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like he would have enjoyed the Canon Cat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat

Still doesn't explain it.

[golodh]

All valid points you raise about current Office suites having bugs and their interfaces being, in places, counter-intuitive. I won't argue with that.

However, it still doesn't explain to me why a ground-up rewrite is needed instead of, say, a highly customisable interface plus bug-fixing.

Re:Still doesn't explain it.

[speaker of the truth]

However, it still doesn't explain to me why a ground-up rewrite is needed instead of, say, a highly customisable interface plus bug-fixing. Sometimes a ground-up rewrite can be less time consuming. I've seen professional commercial developers do this when necessary.

What's up with Slashcode on KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Debian Etch Konqueror 3.5.5 and Slashdot renders the comments overview and button to change the threading in the sidebar since 2 days, all in a pile, unusable. I know sysadmins aren't supposed to be reading Slashdot at work but why bork the site just because the US economy is doing a bit worse?

No, I didn't realise that

[golodh]

No, I didn't realise that, although I *did* try KOffice a long time ago, when KDE was the new thing. I put it aside very quickly and went back to MS Word and Latex.

But Ok, I take your point. KOffice started as Open Source text processor before StarOffice did. So KOffice isn't a me-too response to Open Office. I'll take that back.

However ... I still think that as in terms of adoptation Open Office is so far ahead because (a) in terms of features (features that I've come to expect) Open Office offers a lot more than KOffice and (b) as a "drop-in" replacement for MS Office, Open Office is viable right now, that it makes it at least unclear why we need a ground-up-different product like KOffice.

Shuttleworth considers to replace OOo by KOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

As you can hear by listening to this podcast , Mark Shuttleworth considers KOffice a serious contender to be made the successor of OOo as the default *buntu office suite, should the current mess with OOo continue or become worse even. ["Ubuntu chief bids for prima-donna status"]

This is good news

[ajs318]

This is actually good news. But first, let me say how appalled I am that nobody ported it to Windows already -- the underlying Qt libraries have been available under the GPL for some time now, and according to Clause Six nobody could prevent some third party from porting them to Windows. Just goes to show what we already knew: Windows programmers are more interested in pirating closed-source payware and developing malware than in developing Free Software.

I've been using KOffice since mid-2002, and it's definitely getting there -- every release is noticeably better than the one before. And KOffice has two definite advantage over OO.o.

1. KOffice was written Open Source from the ground up. So everybody on the development team is intimately acquainted with the code; UNLIKE OpenOffice.org which began as a closed-source, proprietary application and featured the kind of gross misuses that would have had any CompSci student failed on the spot. It's amazing, the sort of crap people will come out with if they don't think anyone will ever see it.
2. KOffice is unabashedly ploughing its own furrow, NOT trying just to replicate MS Office -- so it won't get a whole star knocked off every time it dares to do something ever-so-slightly differently than MS Office.

If it can live up to the promise I've seen so far, KOffice could actually end up taking over from OpenOffice.org.

Re:This is good news

[tehcyder]

I've been using KOffice since mid-2002, and it's definitely getting there

Talk about damning with faint praise...

Re:This is good news

[ajs318]

Well, the last version of KOffice wasn't quite ready for the power-user -- some of the advanced features can behave a bit temperamentally -- and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. I'm unashamed of my preference for industrial-quality gear. On the other hand, it's still more than adequate for writing short letters and keeping home accounts; which is probably all that 90% of users want.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[ThePhilips]

If it's really as good as they say, there's a good chance I'll switch over.

First, this is /. - not GNOME forums - you do not have to drop your whole DE just to run a KDE application.

Second, it is not "as good as they say." It is just competitors are so much worse.

Beyond simple text editing OO.o is barely usable. OOWriter is OK for tech documentation which would be later converted into PDF. Making nice looking document - impossible. HTML import/export are completely unusable. AbiWord is absolutely strange beast - I wasn't being able to create a single 2+ page document without hitting some snag. Import/export better be described as defunct - anything more complicated than plain text (e.g. tables) just not supported.

In KOffice 1.5 I had created bunch of documents w/o problems - mostly text documents and one spread sheet. Though trying to import (least edit) them in OO.o was pretty unsuccessful: lost formating or worse completely screwed up formating shows up. (I had a ridiculous situation when OO.o was showing text in font size of about 7pt, while style claimed that it was in fact (as it should be) 13pt). Problem with font name unportability had also beaten me very often.

From my experience, you have more chances of OO.o -> KOffice import than KOffice -> OO.o. So I personally rate KOffice higher just on that ground. It still misses some features, but for smallish documents it is already in near perfect shape.

[ Funnily, for large documents, OO.o remains better: it is more stable right now than KOffce or M$Office. I had crashed OO.o only on few occasions. KOffice 1.5 crashed on me pretty often - especially on import/export. (I reported some bugs and last I heard they were fixed in 1.6). M$Office on large documents not only crashes, but has extra feature: it hangs on large documents open from network. [ AbiWord crashed on me constantly in past. ] ]

P.S. Though vector graphics application in KOffice is as useless as one from OO.o. None of them support any kind of standard notation. Drawing even simple decent UML or network chart is experience not for weak-hearted. Updating/maintaining it - mission impossible and it is quicker to redo whole drawing anew.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[the_womble]

I am a definite fan of KDE and many KDE based apps, with the notable exception of Koffice: my favourite spreadsheet is Gnumeric, for word processing I use Open Office for short documents and Latex for long ones.

I have also tried Gnome (though not for as long for six months)

As you seem to have almost exactly opposite likes to mine and you ave actually tested the alternatives, it seems worth asking why you prefer Gnome?

My preference for KDE is relatively straightforward: Konqueror, various little apps (panel applets like the quick file browser, Katapult, Klipper), I use slightly more KDE than Gtk apps, and various KIOslaves.

Someone is wearing their bad idea jeans

[AP31R0N]

*grr* Dear Open Source Community, This is why FOSS/OSS is not a threat to M$. You all have your incomplete pet projects with dozens of users that are no match for what M$ offers... unity. M$ Office integrates into Windows. i can go to any company in the first world and know how to operate their computers. Until you guys start consolidating your efforts and making ONE worth office suite (OO.o is cool, i use it as much as i can, but it is NOT a replacement for MSO yet), and ONE operating system, the world will view Linux and Open Source as the purview of nerds. Nothing would please me more than to reformat my hard drive, install TEH Linux (teh as in, the only one). But i can't until PlanetSide and MSO can run on it. i can't until i know there will be a driver for my next video card. i can't rely on OO.o until it can mail merge and has a "Send to Email Recipient" button. i can't until i know that i'm not going to need to learn shell scripting or CLI to get the thing to install or work. i can't until i know that the files i create can be used on the most possible machines. Pooling your efforts just might get that done. Or, you could keep doing what you're doing, and keep getting the results you're already getting. This is where some fanboi flames me for "not getting it". Or someone says, "but OSS is about choice, having a single version of Linux is against what it stands for". Sure, great, but don't stand there scratching your head wondering why you use Debian at home but must suffer through using Windows at work. Or why you have to load Windows when you want to play a current game, or just about any game with more than one player. i don't want choices in operating systems, i want choices in software and hardware. Mac and Linux (and the other pet OSes) offer a fraction of what M$ does. Remember kids - If someone says something you disagree with, mod them as Flamebait!

Re:Someone is wearing their bad idea jeans

[Ash-Fox]

*grr* Dear Open Source Community, This is why FOSS/OSS is not a threat to M$.

I find it difficult to take someone seriously who refers to Microsoft as M$, does not do paragraphs and growls at the reader. However, I will humor you.

It's interesting that you claim FOSS/OSS is not a threat to Microsoft when just yesterday Microsoft did yet another 'attack'.

i can go to any company in the first world and know how to operate their computers.

I doubt it.

Until you guys start consolidating your efforts and making ONE worth office suite (OO.o is cool, i use it as much as i can, but it is NOT a replacement for MSO yet), and ONE operating system, the world will view Linux and Open Source as the purview of nerds.

Why don't you tell Microsoft to make a single operating system, Like, Windows Vista - No editions, no server OSes. Why don't you tell Microsoft not to create multiple Office suites Which they did with Microsoft Office home/home professional/professional/enterprise, Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office Live etc.

I find it strange you criticize independent developers for creating different projects on their own and compare them to a single company who creates multiple products and then claim that this company only makes a single product.

Nothing would please me more than to reformat my hard drive, install TEH Linux (teh as in, the only one).

There is only one real Linux - Enjoy.

OF course if you want a OS, I'd suggest you choose a OS. There is only one Kubuntu, only one Centos, only one whatever.

i can't rely on OO.o until it can mail merge and has a "Send to Email Recipient" button.

Have you sent a feature request?

i can't until i know that i'm not going to need to learn shell scripting or CLI to get the thing to install or work.

Not had this issue with OpenOffice under Windows or Kubuntu. Can install it through the GUI just fine and I have never needed to use CLI to mess with OpenOffice.org yet.

i can't until i know that the files i create can be used on the most possible machines.

I think you need to learn how to use the save as dialog.

If you want to export it to a Microsoft document format, you can.

Pooling your efforts just might get that done.

So, who are you exactly? I want to know exactly what makes you a holy all knowing God that can justify this? What previous experience do you have? What research can you give me that this is the best method? Why can't you use paragraphs?

Sure, great, but don't stand there scratching your head wondering why you use Debian at home but must suffer through using Windows at work. Or why you have to load Windows when you want to play a current game, or just about any game with more than one player.

I actually use Kubuntu at home, at work and for playing games (games I run under Wine even run faster than under native windows for some reason on the same hardware). Sorry, your generalizations do not apply to me at all.

i don't want choices in operating systems, i want choices in software and hardware.

Well, maybe others want choices in operating systems, you aren't the center of the universe.

Mac and Linux (and the other pet OSes) offer a fraction of what M$ does.

Care to elaborate?

Remember kids - If someone says something you disagree with, mod them as Flamebait!

Honestly, it feels like I've been baited.

KOffice ain't the only OpenOffice Competitor...

[NPN_Transistor]

When KOffice 2.0 is released in 2008, it won't be the only competitor to OpenOffice - if you haven't already, check out Lotus Symphony, another open source, ODF-compatible office suite that is expected to come out of Beta in 2008.

Latex2HTML ?

[curri]

It gives you HTML that you can then import in word (from latex, not the PDF)

Re:Latex2HTML ?

[Anonymous Coward]

tried this before. It simply jammed all my text together in a single paragraph. Do I need some extra environment for that?

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[saintlupus]

Really? Problems with Impress? I've used it for all of my course slides when I teach, and also for presentations at a couple of conferences, and never had a problem.

I'm using pretty simple formatting and stuff, though; mostly text, the occasional static .png file, no transitions or sounds or anything. How are you killing it?

--saint

It IS open source all over (but not the exe)

[curri]

Kexi IS open source; however, there is a company that builds it for Windows and charges you for it (I'm not sure how that works if it's GPL licensed but ...). Similar to what RedHat etc do with Linux

Re:It IS open source all over (but not the exe)

[caseih]

Kexi would be dual-licensed. You can do what you want with the code when you own the copyright! The version you'd buy from them is not under the GPL so you can't turn around and treat it like open source. Also, if you are a business, since you're dealing with a Qt-derived product, it would be hard to build a closed-source, standalone business app with the OSS version of Kexi.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[JanneM]

Try put both Japanese and English text in it. Or try to make a slide template and use it. Or any of a dozen other ways you can trigger weird formatting bugs, or lose content.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[saintlupus]

I haven't tried to use Japanese text (I don't know the language, so it's really never been an issue) but slide templates have always worked fine for me. Odd. What distro were you having problems with? I'm just curious... I run a really simple WindowMaker on Debian desktop, and I don't seem to get bitten by a lot of the application bugs that people complain about.

--saint

Not released later, different program

[curri]

I don't know what exactly are they doing now, but many MS Office features appear first on the mac versions :) MS Office 2008 for Mac will probably have a *different* feature set than MSO 2007 for Windows, including some not on the Windows version.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[greenguy]

As you seem to have almost exactly opposite likes to mine and you ave actually tested the alternatives, it seems worth asking why you prefer Gnome? To me, Gnome feels like my living room, and KDE feels like a sterile businessplace. Yes, I can probably do my work a bit more efficiently in an office, but I look forward to quitting time. Gnome isn't as configurable, but it doesn't need to be, because it's really pretty good as it is. It makes me feel at home.

Still, I'll give KDE 4 a try.

Try the code indentation.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Just a little bit...

Seriously, every language has similar constraints. I'm confused that nobody ever complains about having to have a semicolon at the end of every line, even when it's obvious to the compiler/interpreter that it is the end of a line -- yet when you're told to indent your code the way you should anyway, it's oppressive? What?

As for your app, assuming you are actually using object-oriented development under the hood -- the fact that you were scared by an "everything is an object" language scares me, frankly -- it looks like it could be VERY interesting. Any plans for a web interface?

Re:Try the code indentation.

[vandan]

As for your app, assuming you are actually using object-oriented development under the hood -- the fact that you were scared by an "everything is an object" language scares me, frankly -- it looks like it could be VERY interesting.

Yes of course it's all OO under the hood. I didn't make any reference to being scared about Python's OO nature, I simply stated that I don't like anal constraints, such us those on code formatting. I've seen some pretty strangely formatted code in my time - everyone has their own style. I didn't like Python's style, and since I didn't have an option, I didn't pursue it. Perl appeared to do everything that Python could do, plus some good friends programmed in Perl, so I could work on stuff with them, plus the Perl community is huge compared to the Python community. There were plenty of reasons. There still are.

Any plans for a web interface?

No. Web 'interfaces' suck. Read the 'forms' and 'datasheets' page on my website. I've spent a hell of a lot of time making sure the libraries will work well over slow network connections. Gtk2::Ex::DBI has built-in record paging ( which I hacked into it with a plain-text editor when I was on holiday in Cambodia ). Gtk2::Ex::Datasheet::DBI stores all data in the treemodel while you're working on it, and you send back big chunks of updates ( and / or inserts ) when you're done. So both work very well remotely. I realise that you need to install some libraries on the client PCs, whereas with a web-based solution you wouldn't have to, but frankly, it's more than work it, just for the incredible control over the GUI and huge feature-set that it brings. If someone wants to try to add a web interface, then they're more than welcome to, but it's not something I've ever seriously considered. I have written a PHP-based CRM package for our sales team, largely because they work from home ( and all around Australia ), and they also don't last long, so we're *always* getting new salespeople. It would be handy in this case, but still, a huge majority of my work is in a rich GUI environment like Gtk2, and I really like it this way.

Re:Try the code indentation.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sorry about the OO comment, apparently I was confusing you with someone else there -- there was someone who doesn't like the "everything is an object" way.

I've seen some pretty strangely formatted code in my time - everyone has their own style. I didn't like Python's style, and since I didn't have an option, I didn't pursue it.

What this tells me is that you grew up with C, or something similar. It doesn't explain why you've chosen to regard code indentation as a sacred element of "style", and not, say, semicolons at the end of every statement, curly braces for blocks, parentheses for both overriding precedence and passing arguments, and so on.

I get that you don't like it, but I don't think syntax alone should be a major reason to ignore a language, although it may make the learning curve a bit harder.

Perl appeared to do everything that Python could do, plus some good friends programmed in Perl, so I could work on stuff with them, plus the Perl community is huge compared to the Python community. There were plenty of reasons. There still are.

Most of those, I consider valid. I use Perl. But really, the indentation is hardly worth mentioning.

Imagine if it was the other way around -- if Perl forced indentation. Wouldn't you still use it, for all the other reasons you stated?

Web 'interfaces' suck.

All interfaces suck. The important thing here is, why do web interfaces suck?

I hate to be trendy, but XMLHttpRequest (AJAX) would work very well here.

I've spent a hell of a lot of time making sure the libraries will work well over slow network connections.

I remember when the Web worked reasonably well over dialup. And that was before widespread use of Javascript, let alone AJAX.

Gtk2::Ex::DBI has built-in record paging ( which I hacked into it with a plain-text editor when I was on holiday in Cambodia ).

If I understand "record paging" here, it looks like it means you can perform some query and get only partial results, and then, transparently, pull in more results as needed as the user "pages" (scrolls?) through the records. Not having used your software, let alone dug into the code, I'm only guessing here...

But if so, that would be easy with a Web interface. User requests next page, so an HTTP request gets sent to the server -- it comes back with a small chunk of XML (or JSON) representing more records to be added to the aperture.

Now, if you meant "paging to disk", as in a local cache, you've got me -- cookies certainly aren't enough storage here.

you send back big chunks of updates ( and / or inserts ) when you're done.

Again, no problem. Send em back as another chunk of custom XML (or JSAN), describing the operations to be performed. Because of the "A" in AJAX, you could even let the user keep working while this is happening.

I realise that you need to install some libraries on the client PCs, whereas with a web-based solution you wouldn't have to

It's not just "Install some libraries." It's "Install, maintain, and update some 20-30 different libraries."

On Linux, that's not a problem -- we have good package managers. But on Windows, unless you basically implement your own package manager -- and likely waste disk space, unless you cooperate with all the other apps out there that might use your library. On OS X, you have to deal with the fact that probably half the libraries are already installed, but out of date. You could use Fink, but it's likely going to be out of date, or break in some subtle way.

A web interface here means that all the client-side issues go away.

it's more than work it, just for the incredible control over the GUI and huge feature-set that it brings.

I haven't seen one feat

Good Thing and Baseball

[WED Fan]

It's a good thing it is competing against OpenOffice. OpenOffice barely competes against MS Office. KOffice would be slaughtered in that arena. This is like the Yankees (real major league) against the Seattle Mariners (third-tier major league) against the Modesto Nuts (triple-A minor league).

Sure, the Mariners (OpenOffice) can put in a good year, but some years, they could be beaten by the Nuts (KOffice), and the Yankees (MS Office) are hated by most, but still trounce the competition most of the time. Hell, half the time, the competition is just in awe to be in their stadium.

October rules.

Even if this is not a Yankee year. It most certainly wasn't the Mariners'.

That's because MS Office is preloaded.

[biendamon]

Try comparing the boot times of a Windows system that doesn't have MS Office and a similar system with MS Office. With current hardware and versions of MS Office, I usually see about five seconds of extra lag during boot. If you have the OpenOffice quickstarter loading, that extra five seconds is visible to the user as it loads after the user has signed in. If you don't use the quickstarter, then you see it when you first load OpenOffice manually, as you say.

KOffice, in my experience, loads significantly faster than either MS Office or OpenOffice, and doesn't impact boot time. On the other hand, its support for ODF and the way it treats text styles are practically the definition of suck. I have very high hopes for 2.0, though, and will certainly give it a shot when it's available.

Databases and end users

[rduke15]

look at Lotus Approach. IT should be the envy of Open Source developers who are designing for END-USER accession, not developing for geeks or nerds or power-user-going-programmer. The database application needs to have WOW factor for end-users.

Sorry but I disagree. I don't know Approach, but I have seen many times what happens when "end users" are given an easy to use database (it was always Filemaker). The result is much worse than what the other users do in Excel (because they don't have an easy DB). In Excel, they realize much faster that it doesn't really work and that they need to ask someone for help. With Filemaker, they do not realize it for years. They just keep adding fields and layouts, until nobody can make any sense of it.

Normal "end users" cannot develop databases. The only way to help them is to let them know early enough that they need the help of someone who understands databases. I mean at a very basic level. The problem is that the way humans normally think is completely incompatible with the mechanical rigidity of computer databases.

Yes, Access is for "power users". It's the minimum requirement to build a half decent version of very simple database. They can then do the forms which the end users will see. And they will (hopefully) see quickly enough when they need someone else.

Re:Databases and end users

[davidsyes]

Like you said, "I don't know Approach...". You should find a way to look at it from who the TARGET audience is. Home users of a database don't want nor NEED to become developers. Lotus Approach took me about 2 weeks to get really comfortable. Access, never, for me. Filemaker, ehh. It was too developer-aimed, IMO.

Lotus Approach IS used by some serious development types of work, mainly as a front end to Oracle, MySQL, mssql, and some 10 or 15 other db back ends. The data and forms are separate, and have always been, unlike what, Access, which took YEARS for ms to "get it".

Approach is WYSIWYG, so right from the word GO no one NEED be a developer.

NO ONE should be using spreadsheets to do non-statistical storage of data. This happened because for years either the tools didn't exist to appease the desk-side data analyst-- they had to rely on IT. The other part is some developers were lazy or territorial, and LOTS of companies and IT staff are mixed on hoard the data (not just from protection of data, but for IT job security), or share the data (so IT can concentrate on OTHER more important tasks than to risk backlash of "THAT'S not the report I ASKED FOR...".

The other problem is that ms popularized excel, and businesses did, too. LOTS of bad habits grew up around the kludge excel is. It is an abominable excuse for a database wannabe.

Approach lets people GET WORK DONE. People who need databases and never before saw one get sample database tables and applications in Approach. They can reverse engineer these and customize them.

The biggest drawbacks of Approach:

-- no runtime executable (royalty free, or otherwise)
-- not a big enough widget set (compared to FMP, Access, et al...
-- poor or non-existent ERD
-- only runs on windoze
-- not separable from Lotus SmartSuite (except the Japanese version IS separate...)
-- only in maintenance/patch mode, since IBM is SITTING on Lotus SmartSuite, letting it die a slow, worthless death, as if even IBM's OWN want it to die, despite their "10 million S/S users..."
-- not built-in way to record and reuse queries; but users created this and sell solutions

Pluses:

- I use it as a front end to my Linux & win98-based MySQL engine
- I am writing a screenplay dialog and script tracking database
- I can build in minutes or hours what would take me and MOST non-developers days or WEEKS to do in access
- It's GREAT for an ad hoc WYSIWYG prototyping tool

You admit you don't know Approach, yet you could almost single-handedly dissuade most readers here from even considering it. Approach -- if IBM opened up its code-- could almost single-handedly kill Rekall, Kexi, and a slew of others that still retain the giant framework, geek-appeal that most END USERS will run from. Approach is good enough that user- and developer-based solutions are sold all the time.

C'mon man, check out Approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_SmartSuite

http://xpertss.com/

http://orderdeskxpert.3dcartstores.com/Order-Center_c_1.html

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Office_Productivity/Office_Suites/Lotus_SmartSuite/Lotus_Approach/Q_22816555.html

http://jabrown.customer.netspace.net.au/approach/index.htm

http://wapedia.mobi/en/Lotus_Approach

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/smartsuite/approachfeatures.html

What COULD happen but isn't is that IBM could:

-- partner with Sun/OpenOffice.org
-- open the code to Kexi, t

Yeah... and then...?

[Nicolay77]

And then edit the .ps file with Gimp?

Learn the postcript language and edit it with emacs?

Editing PDFs like MSWord sounds more than good enough to me to mention it.

The problem with KOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to pronounce the name in Finnish sounds like someone dropped something in his beer.

"Missä mun avaimet on?" = "Where are my keys?"

"Ne on sun Koffis" = "They are in your Koff (~beer)"