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?
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.
already done
Look, think about it as a positive. Lots of people are testing the same UI on different platforms so any bugs found on Linux will be fixed in Windows too. Also users can move between operating systems without having a radically different interface.
Strategically KOffice matters to the Office File Format debate... OpenDocument (ODF) vs Microsofts OOXML.
Healthy competition in standards is needed like it is in the browser market. KOffice uses ODF (of course it couldn't use OOXML without reverse-engineering) and by being the second most popular implementation it helps keep OpenOffice.org honest (not that there's any sign that they're not honest). When MSOffice support ODF then KOffice will be more important still -- it will help evaluate ODF compliance and interoperability.
Microsoft Office earns them 10 billion and a part of that is coming out of your country's economy -- competition in the form of KOffice is very good indeed. It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.
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.
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
On thing that concerns me - Linux-style package management is something that anyone who has been using Linux for any length of time will know and understand - but for a general 'Doze user to suddenly be told "you want to install packages A, B, +C, which require packages X, Y, +Z", this is going to set off all sorts of alarms. A lot of Windows users are (finally) getting used to the idea that some software will try and install all manner of nasties, they are going to see this list of additional software that needs installing, and freak out, meaning theyre not going to install it. Pity, as this looks as if it could potentially be a viable alternative to MS Orifice or OpenOffice.
It's particularly good that they're embracing Windows -- it worked for Firefox.
Yep, pretty soon I'll be installing Firefox to replace my Windows installation.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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.
... and they want their UI back.
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?
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.
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?
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"
Do we really need two or more office alternatives?
Yes, we do. Your question is like saying "Do we need anything else that's not MS Office?"
Having at least two cross-platform office suites gives people choice. You don't have to like ooo's interface/speed/memory usage because now you have Koffice, and if you don't like Koffice, you have ooo, abiword-gnumeric, etc.
I personally, like Koffice a lot more than ooo, maybe the ooo team could work together with Koffice :).
Why? Emacs uses less RAM. PLUS it has a web browser built in
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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
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