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Does the End of KOffice Mean the End of KDE?
jfruhlinger writes "Venerable Linux office suite KOffice has been reborn as "Calligra," a name meant to evoke calligraphy but perhaps a bit too close to the neme of a deranged Roman emperor. Perhaps more importantly, Calligra seems to be cooperating with the future MeeGo mobile Linux distro. Could this be the beginning of the end of the KDE desktop, at least under its current branding?"
not just the end of KDE - but the end of all life on earth!
What a stupid headline. Page views, clicks, etc. Yeah I know.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
There is clearly a typo in the summary, this is a KDE project so it would have to be Kalligra.
What happened to that annoying K in all names of the K Desktop Environment?
They went to the same place all the intuitive configuration options went in GNOME.
That's right. I went there.
Let's tag this story "troll" and move on quickly.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
The real hint is this:
Currently all applications except Calligra Words will be maintained by their respective KOffice developers.
It's more than a renaming, they split. However, when the dust cleared only the KWord developers went with the other group, the rest of the KOffice projects joined what's now Calligra. As far as I can tell the KWord guys wanted to focus on competing with MS Office and OpenOffice for the desktop, while the Calligra Words guys wanted to focus more on mobile. With enough different agendas going on in the same project they had conflict and eventually split. That's at least as far as I've caught the story.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I know I never have, and I use KDE quite a lot. I don't know anyone that has. It's usually OpenOffice.org that's being use.
I've tried to use KOffice. Lord, how I've tried. I hate OpenOffice with a passion, but I just keep coming back to it.
There's really only one thing holding KOffice back from general recognition as an Office contender: the font rendering/kerning is abysmal.
The history behind this is tragic: someone in both the KDE and KOffice projects made it a principle that these projects should always use Qt libraries whenever possible instead of re-inventing the wheel. On paper, this sounds good. The problem is that there are still areas where the current Qt libraries....well, suck. Font rendering is one, printing is another. Thus, KOffice sucks and fonts and KDE sucks at printing (KDE3 was great at this because they used their own libraries).
This is not usually a big deal because bugs can be fixed, right? Not in this case. The KDE and KOffice people point at the guiding principle (use Qt libraries) and say it's a Qt problem--ask Qt for a fix. The Qt people say that these features are not important to include in their libraries (because neither KDE nor KOffice are their bread and butter). And nobody fixes the problem.
Actually that's not entirely true. The Scribus team created their own font rendering library for their Qt-based app. Because they don't want to produce crap, even if they have to re-invent the wheel to avoid producing crap.
Here is some more background on the split
http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m=128782551919625&w=2
As I'm reading this thread I'd suggest this link instead:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m=128812911619277&w=2