Slashdot Mirror
Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 – On Windows
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."
Some people like to start a download then go off and have lunch whilst something downloads, not to come back and find out it wants you to download some more stuff.
Why had this taken so long? KOffice is built with Qt, a robust cross-platform gui toolkit, http://trolltech.com/products/qt/.
Being a enterprise developer using Qt, the worse that I've had to deal with is some linking issues with dynamic libraries and GUI adjustments when porting to windows from linux...
Perhaps the "KDE" portion of the code is harder to port than the "Qt" portion?
While this is certainly great news for KDE realistically we are going to be able to count the number of Windows users on one hand. There will be plenty of people (me included) that will down load it to see how good it is but then never use it again because it's incompatable with other office software*. While I know it can read ODF and .doc etc it doesn't do it well enough that it's a drop in replacement for MS Office or even Open Office.
Personally I really hope that they port Kontact soon. It's streets ahead of Thunderbird and a half way decent competitor to Outlook.
* any broken formatting when opening a non-native file format means it's incompatible as far as I'm concerned.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
KOffice is different from OO and MSOffice in that it has a clean codebase and is written for a toolkit which actually also is used for something else. Even microsoft doesn't eat its own dogfood and steers clear of dot net for MSOffice. In this way KOffice must be faster growing and could have a nice future.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
in a year or two, as this ports mature, Windows and OSX are going to be flooded with KDE free software: Amarok music player, Gwenview image viewer, Digikam photo manager, Kopete instant messenger, and many many more. I think this is exciting news but probably a bit scary for commercial ISVs...
Check out my cross-platform apps
I agree. The way that Windows package management, if you will, is geared towards single file binary installers. Or, a network admin install, as MSI supports both. Really, I haven't seen much legit use of DLLs as they were intended (shared libraries) when it comes to applications. After "DLL Hell" everyone just started statically linking in the libraries, and can you blame them? I mean, MSI does have some really cool features, but dependency tracking for DLLs is not one of them.
.msi, double click on it, and watch the bar go across the screen. And, for the most part, Windows does this well, barring the usual head-desk moments that we all love (aha! let's use spaces in the %programfiles% directory name and then half support them and leave everyone guessing where they should put quotes!) and I don't think that we should try force Linux style library schemes on to a system that doesn't want or need it. Doubly so for users that won't understand it!
I routinely have statically linked executables that will just refuse to uninstall and I can't get rid of the entry. Then I'm stuck ripping out shards of the program from every folder structure and the registry... for the next two years. At that point, they're still resident when I blow away my OS partition and steamroller a new Windows install.
People are used to Windows install routines by now; you get the programName-setup.exe or
Full disclosure: I run Slackware and Windows at home (and BSD and Mac) and prefer to compile from source, at work we use RHEL and Windows and if not for the ease of having repositories, I'd take MSI-2/3 over RPM-2/3 any day of the week.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I've been a TeX user most of my working life. But since becoming a teacher, I've realized that I need a word processor for making pretty handouts. Each one of my handouts is layed out differently, so doing that in TeX was taking too much time.
But, OOWriter is driving me batty. Really, I just need to make numbered paragraphs with numbered points underneath. I need to be able to paste pretty clipart and wrap paragraphs around or through them. I need to be able to write Japanese text. And I need to be able to output PDF (optionally doc file format too).
It shouldn't be too bad. But OOWriter is insane. It keeps renumbering my paragraphs, seemingly randomly (and often between loads and saves). It changes my fonts on me (again often between loads and saves). I've tried to turn off every fricken' "auto" feature I can, but it still insists on guessing what I want (badly). I really do hate it.
So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?
I can't think of a benefit that couldn't be replicated through another method with both less hassle for the user AND less work for the developers.
Slashdot recently ran a story about a study of dial-up Internet users, which showed that 49 percent of dial-up Internet users in the United States couldn't afford broadband. The OpenOffice.org project works around this by listing vendors that will distribute copies on CDs for a fee. Once KOffice for Windows is out of alpha and beta, who will be the first to do the same for KOffice?
it's an alpha of a port to a new platform, i'd be willing to look the other way on just about any issue that doesn't damage the computer it is installed to.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Thanks, actually I already tried this, and it's not that good, unfortunately. It lags rather a lot on my machine, and the text rendering is quite poor too.
Not that it isn't a nice start, but that's why I specified 'native'. I want Kwrite working on windows without needing anything but windows QT.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
This is funny. Imagine going to your boss and telling him that some Office bug would cause small rendering errors in 10% of your documents, mandating fixes in up to 1% of old documents that needed re-use. He'd be very slightly concerned.
Now tell him that it'll cost a few thousand dollars to remedy this, you'll have to accept vendor lock-in to prevent it, and that even that version has errors, just fewer, with your documents. You'd need to hire a portability expert to check all the documents for problems and even then, there'd be no guarantee of correctness, or warranty on the software.
See if he cares once he hears about the price tag.
If you present this as "I could save thousands by installing untested new software" they'll laugh. But if you question the wisdom of buying all-new software for thousands of dollars, they'll ask why the old version needs updating. If you explain about the possibility of layout glitches they'll probably explain that they used to survive just fine with carbon-paper copies and not to worry about looks.
The decision to switch away from MS is dangerous - they're liable if anything goes wrong. So just phrase the question as one of upgrading to new MS software, so they'd be liable for all the costs and problems and the only real benefit is layout compatibility with some documents. They just don't see that side. And they see MS saying that if you don't upgrade your documents will come to life and eat people. They have no real understanding and it's up to you to present problems in a realistic way.
I'll allow myself to go on a slightly off-topic rant here.
This "cross-platform UI" thing in OO.o is ridiculous. It looks like shit, at least the GTK interface. Even the scrollbars aren't correct if you look closely, and refreshing issues make the equation editor nearly unusable. This is because their GUI abstraction layer is FUBAR.
There are only 3 corect ways here:
1. Same look on all platforms by using a toolkit that draws its own widgets
2. Use a windowing toolkit like GTK or WxWidgets, and let the toolkit devs sort out the look on ach platform
3. Write a native interface for each platform
The OO.o team chose neither, and implemented a half-assed mixture of 1, 2 and 3. In effect they use something like their own lightweight toolkit that has modules to use some drawing primitives of each platform, but doesn't utilize whole widgets. This is very wrong. because OO.o widgets will look like native ones but behave in subtly different ways. However, it's too late to fix this as this would require massive changes and regressions.
I just hope the KOffice team takes route 2, but that's dependent on Trolltech releasing Qt for Windows which uses native Windows widgets.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.