OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

[woodsmoke]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

I just got a look at the new enhanced and wonderful MS office latest thing at the college, the "splash" for first running it looks remarkably like Koffice!

It has "shadows" under the sheet of paper, and seems all...kind of....don't know.... "glowy" as it were... but the ribbon is still there.

woodsmoke

[Tanner1294]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

I can definitely say I LOVED the new MS Office. Worked great, easy to use. The one MS did right.

[PhilT]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

But, is Calligra is the Future of Free Software Office Suites?

This KDE developer's blog emphasises the benefits of the Qt development arena and the clean code base. Interesting read.

http://ingwa2.blogspot.com/2011/05/c...-software.html

[GreyGeek]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

It is. He does a very nice job of outlining Qt's strengths.

Calligra is a fork of KOffice. It is not in the repositories and KOffice is. I have moved to KOffice as my go to office app because I find it faster than LibraO to load and save, and it reads MS doc files very well. I don't know if it could handle the "Master document" scenario that I used to build my wife's family history document, but that is done and KOffice has been working for everything else.

[PhilT]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

So, do you think Callibra will become the KDE default once the first "stable" version is released?

[GreyGeek]

Re: OpenOffice INSTEAD of Libreoffice.

YES.

Aaron Seigo, KDE lead dev, explained the Koffice - Calligra fork here. The announcement of Calligra as the "continuation of KOffice" is here.

Basically, it came down to one person wanting to control the whole show and continue KOffice down the PC path only, while the rest wanted to rework the code base, make it more flexible, drop the cludge and kruft, and include mobile devices as targets for installation. That doesn't mean it is leaving the desktop behind. The one person wouldn't budge, so the rest forked. As you might guess, one person cannot do all the work on such a large project. This puts KOffice at a disadvantage. To make matters clear, Calligra's source is already on projects.kde.org's development repository. And, Aaron Seigo has already announced the joining of "Active Plasma" and Calligra, so it looks like Calligra has all the momentum.

Ergo, KOffice, for all practical purposes, is dead. I expect that sometime in the near future Calligra will begin appearing in the Kubuntu main repository and KOffice will slide to a ppa or disappear altogether.

I may continue to use KOffice until Calligra appears in the repository but, I like Calligra's development model and their refracting of the code base to take better advantage of Qt's assets. So, I may download the tar and install it. I haven't decided yet. It depends on if I feel up to compiling the entire source code, which is how it is available from http://www.calligra-suite.org/get-calligra/

EDIT: I forgot... one fly in the ointment is Nokia abandoning MeGo and laying off a LOT of developers. Many of those were probably Qt developers. There are some critical bugs in Qt related to KWord/Calligra's text document functions which the Nokia dev said he was working on as hard as he could. I don't know if he is still working for Nokia, or working on Qt.