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Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 – On Windows

Posted by timothy on from the didn't-see-that-coming-did-you dept.

4WebChimps writes "As featured previously on Slashdot, the KOffice project is working towards a cross-platform, open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The most recent release, KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8, achieved that goal by being the first release for all three operating systems simultaneously. Want to try KOffice on Windows? TechWorld has a review (with screenshots) of KOffice on Windows, including the installation process which is as simple as clicking a few buttons (the online installer does the rest). Hopefully it won't be long before KOffice sits alongside OpenOffice.org as a usable cross-platform open source productivity suite."

13 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Review? Really? by knutert · · Score: 5, Informative

    Calling it a review is stretching it...in short, he installed it and noticed that it ran slow, which is probably because it is alpha software.

  2. Re:Why ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because the older versions of Qt that the old KDE was built on was only free/Free on Linux. Windows Qt used to be only available with a expensive commercial license, and nobody from KDE felt like paying for the privilege of supplying free software to Windows users.

  3. Re:kwrite? by entrigant · · Score: 3, Informative

    already done

  4. Re:Why ... by entrigant · · Score: 5, Informative

    QT was not GPL on windows until version 4

  5. Re:Excellent news by tomtomtom777 · · Score: 5, Informative

    My personal favorite is Krita, which IMHO is surpasses GIMP in many ways. Full CMYK support, much more friendly user interface and better intergration with the Office suite.

  6. Re:euch by MrHanky · · Score: 5, Informative

    The benefit is that the installer will take care of dependencies, so that the user doesn't have to install a >100 MB package for each program she wants, or to install a huge package of apps if she only wants a few.

    I can't think of a reason why this shouldn't be obvious.

  7. Just tried it out by retro83 · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a good start! It fires up OK, but cannot open any documents (message says: "Cannot read from start of file"). There are also still a lot of crashes which is to be expected - but unfortunately it leaves a whole load of KDE processes running when it does so. Looks fantastic though, and it starts surprisingly fast. I really hope this becomes stable enough to be a viable alternative to MS/Open Office.

  8. Re:euch by Vectronic · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed, I was hoping they would be a little more quick with it, but I think you are right in saying "long term plan" was about right, although I imagine that if its anything like Slashdot (et al) that trying to find people to blaspheme and create Windows stuff is a problem.

    Although, im not sure where the 20MB's came from now anyways (I responded before even looking).. but after looking the installer is only 1.6MB ... which isnt too bad, seeing how many languages it supports, and the fact it may even come with 2 different compilers aswell...

  9. Re:Good Free Software WordPro Recommendation? by apathy+maybe · · Score: 3, Informative

    I looked at http://www.lyx.org/ a few years ago, and it was alright. It wasn't what I wanted though, not needing or knowing LaTeX.

    However, you already use TeX, so it might just what you want.

    Or alternatively, have a look at AbiWord from http://www.abisource.com/ it is simple, and shouldn't screw things up if you use the native file format (an XML based thingy).

    I use AbiWord all the time for quick loading WP without too many fancy things. One caveat, it sometimes crashes for no explicable reason, and then causes you to have to re-write everything that you hadn't saved.

    --
    I wank in the shower.
  10. Re:1997 called... by zander · · Score: 3, Informative

    The screenshots have just been made with a bad theme, in vista it looks native.

  11. Re:Why ... by should_be_linear · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is where Java shines. In C++, you can use platform-independent frameworks, but still you need for each and every platform to setup (possibly virtual) machine with compilation build-chain, installation process, and you better test if final result really works or some library is missing. Assuming you don't use 64-bit version of each platform, which doubles maintenance/QA effort. After all this you just *hope* you don't recieve that "Your app regularly crash on my FreeBSD x.y.z !" e-mail. For big projects like KDE/KOffice obviously this is problem, hence delay of KOffice Windows version, for small development team it is *huge* problem. This is why I really love Java, I almost forgot all STL incompatibility issues and C++ compiler nuances. Its not that Java program cannot behave different on various platforms, its that I encountered it once for last 3 years, and its fixed already in Java 6.

    --
    839*929
  12. Re:kwrite? by SpooForBrains · · Score: 4, Informative

    What does he mean? He means he would like to see Kwrite ported natively to Windows.

    The word processing component of Koffice, to which I assume you think he is referring, is called "KWord".

    --
    "The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
  13. kwrite via MS Windows version of KDE! by pbhj · · Score: 4, Informative

    In which case you should be looking at the KDE install for windows, sorry it's via an easy-as-falling-over installer too.

    http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation

    Kwrite IIRC is part of the default installation - it's on my Vista install (I'm not rebooting to check).

    More info at http://windows.kde.org/ too.

    HTH