KDE Releases Calligra Suite 2.8

It's not just graphics app Krita: user KDE Community writes "The Calligra team is proud and pleased to announce the release of version 2.8 of the Calligra Suite, Calligra Active and the Calligra Office Engine. Major new features in this release are comments support in Author and Words, improved Pivot tables in Sheets, improved stability and the ability to open hyperlinks in Kexi. Flow introduces SVG based stencils and as usual there are many new features in Krita including touch screens support and a wraparound painting mode for the creation of textures and tiles." KDE has also just announced the first beta of its Applications and Platform 4.13.

Comments

It's an Openoffice-like thing

[innocent_white_lamb]

For other folks who are like me, and are wondering what this thing is, it's apparently an office suite like Openoffice, Libreoffice, etc.

I've never heard of it up to now, myself.

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[TyFoN]

It's the old KOffice.

Krita is probably the most usefull of the apps and I've already replaced GIMP with it, however the rest are also slowly maturing :)

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[TuringTest]

Return your geek card (and your low ID at once). Calligra has been talked about many times at Slashdot. It's a fork and renaming of the KOffice suite, the original KDE clone of MS Office.

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, 5 stories about this thing on slashdot in several years. That's way too mainstream for me.

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously?!

The summary has application titles like "Sheets", "Words" and "Office Engine" and people might be at a loss as to what kind of application suite was being discussed ?

I've seen a lot of strange acronymns and odd titles go past in Slashdot posts of yore (that had one scratching one's head) - but this one is definitely a simple one to work out or even guess at without reaching for Google/DuckDuck, assuming someone hadn't already run into the programs (Krita was mentioned just a short while ago - having a new version available and mentioned as a GIMP replacement).

Happily you're just informative - a lot of people would have whinged in some way - you can come aagin ;-)

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[Tough Love]

I hope it doesn't get broken like kmail/akonadi.

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[ClaraBow]

Why was it forked? What are the differences between KOffice and Calligra? Just curious to know if someone here has any insight.

Re: It's an Openoffice-like thing

[BlueLightning]

http://lwn.net/Articles/419822...

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[fnj]

Calligra Flow is definitely the most useful of the apps in the sense of being irreplaceable.

Re:It's an Openoffice-like thing

[unixisc]

Question - how are the apps other than Words and Sheets? In particular, Stage & Kexi - their answers to PowerPoint & Access? They need to get these right as well - then they can focus on making Karbon an alternative to Visio. Anybody used all these other apps? How are they? Here is the full list:

• Words
• Sheets
• Kexi
• Stage
• Plan
• Flow
• Braindump
• Krita
• Karbon

Karbon & Kexi can use more intuitive names: Krita I recognize is Swedish, so can do. Otherwise, who would guess that Kexi is their database application? Or that Karbon is for vector graphics?

Re:Not invented here

[bumba2014]

You're comparing apples with oranges. And you can't compare the Qt/KDE group with GTK/Gnome group, totally different people...

Nasty

[Anonymous Coward]

These are horrible on Windows, except for Krita, which is beautiful.

People complain about ribbons in MS Office, but whoever though up the default UI layout for Words and Sheets should be taken outside and beaten about the head with an IBM Model M keyboard.

Argue about the UI layer itself all you like, but the interface itself is plain stupid. Most people use a mouse or a touchpad. Having to mouse all the way across a 1080p widescreen to get at common controls is stupid as stupid gets.

Yes, there's an argument that with limited vertical space, utilising instead otherwise redundant horizontal space sounds like a great idea. But, when all I see is huge swathes of blank space in a main UI element taking up the right-hand 1/6th of the display, I want to bite something.

I can reposition the control, but the darn thing won't dock to the top because some idiot decided to build the control in such a way to make that impossible.

Look, I get it, a bunch of people are very clever and made a spreadsheet that does really cool and intricate stuff and is a bit like Excel but not quite as full featured but at least it's free. Wonderful and well done to those people but if you want folk to actually use your software, do some bloody user-interaction testing!

Re:Nasty

[slack_justyb]

People who complain about having to mouse over to something, loose all nerd cred with me. Shortcut keys were invented for a reason and you just cannot call yourself a hard-core user if you keep touching your mouse.

Casual users can do, "the mouse-over to the other side of the screen of shame" to pay for their inability to sit down and read a book on how to really use the tool given to you. Not saying I agree with how they have chosen to layout the UI in the Calligra suite, but honestly, at least they haven't f'ed with the shortcut keys since the 2.x series began.

I will now accept all "get off my lawn" comments to follow.

Android?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plans to port to Android?

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The more diversified the applications sphere becomes the better!

Re:just have to say

[Barsteward]

oh please fuck off there as soon as possible

Re:Not invented here

[HiThere]

Given the way that gtk3 "improved" over gtk2, that's not a bad idea. I would really like to not be dependent upon it, because who knows what garbage they'll make and call gtk4.

OTOH, most of the KDE Office suite is unusable. This isn't because of the Qt libraries, though. I haven't been able to figure out WHAT their goal is, but its been nearly a decade and they haven't significantly improved. I used to use KMail, but at one point it broke, and other people's comments have dissuaded be from trying it again.