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Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 – On Windows

Posted by timothy on Friday July 04, @05:28AM
from the didn't-see-that-coming-did-you dept.
KDE Software Windows Linux
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."

Related Stories

[+] KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor 337 comments
Da Massive writes in with a link to a story on KOffice 2.0, the next generation of the KDE office suite due sometime next year. In an interview with KDE spokesman Sebastian Kugler, Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice. It will also feature more applications, including an Access-like database creator, a flowcharter, and an image manipulation tool. KOffice is not yet fully compatible with ODF but the claim is that 2.0 will be.
Firehose:Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 on Windows by Anonymous Coward
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Review of KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 – On Windows 25 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • euch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by abigsmurf (919188) on Friday July 04, @05:35AM (#24056659)
    Anyone else really hate online installers? I hate downloading a 20meg program, getting ready to install and use only to find out that you've then got to wait for the real 200meg program to download.

    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.

    • Re:euch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hedwards (940851) on Friday July 04, @06:03AM (#24056809)

      An online installer shouldn't be 20mb, it should be less than 2mb and pull in just the components necessary to install the rest of the program. The exact size is going to vary from application to application.

      The point of online installers is that they are in theory at least going to be downloading just what you're installing. If a program doesn't offer any options in terms of what to install, it shouldn't offer an online installer as there isn't really any benefit to doing so.

          • Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Ginger Unicorn (952287) on Friday July 04, @06:27AM (#24056933)
            it seems to be a kind of mini package manager that runs on windows, that allows you to install kde apps the same way you do on linux. so this installer thing doesnt just install koffice - it stays on your system and allows you to install and uninstall any other kde apps that become available for windows in the future.

            i think i heard that kde have a long term plan of being able to run a full KDE desktop session on top of windows - presumably this package manager is the foundation of that ultimate goal.

      • Re:euch (Score:5, Informative)

        by MrHanky (141717) on Friday July 04, @06:07AM (#24056829) Homepage Journal

        The benefit is that the installer will take care of dependencies, so that the user doesn't have to install a >100 MB package for each program she wants, or to install a huge package of apps if she only wants a few.

        I can't think of a reason why this shouldn't be obvious.

        • Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)

          by 19061969 (939279) on Friday July 04, @08:04AM (#24057431)

          Maybe a lot of users don't know what a software dependency is?

          It's a valid point - very few people in the real world care or understand about what a shared library is even if you tell them carefully. Let's face it - being into computers is not a majority thing. Most people don't give a stuff. They really just want things to work easily for them.

          • Re:euch (Score:5, Insightful)

            by MrHanky (141717) on Friday July 04, @09:13AM (#24057913) Homepage Journal

            That's a perfectly valid point, but those people shouldn't pollute Slashdot with their silly complaints. Back in the days, people who self-identified as "nerds" would have endless and pointless discussions of making Linux-powered robots that could brew coffee, or configuring Emacs to do it or whatever (single-threaded coffee, urgh), but these days there's a loud majority of Slashbots who seem to think that market share is the only valid goal and hence the only valid technical goal is that idiots should be able to use it: the idiot as the epitome and endpoint of human technical endeavours.

            These people claim the superiority of "it just works" over "how does it work?", and regularly chip in with smug Apple sales pitches, technically and socially impossible suggestions such as that Gnome and KDE should merge, and that software with special dependencies should work just as software without those. The only positive way to deal with these idiots is with sarcasm. I'm sure that if we cared about their views, then we should listen to them, but we shouldn't.

  • Why ... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RalphLeon (856789) on Friday July 04, @05:41AM (#24056697) Homepage

    Why had this taken so long? KOffice is built with Qt, a robust cross-platform gui toolkit, http://trolltech.com/products/qt/ [trolltech.com].

    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?

    • Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04, @05:47AM (#24056727)

      Because the older versions of Qt that the old KDE was built on was only free/Free on Linux. Windows Qt used to be only available with a expensive commercial license, and nobody from KDE felt like paying for the privilege of supplying free software to Windows users.

    • Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by entrigant (233266) on Friday July 04, @05:48AM (#24056733)

      QT was not GPL on windows until version 4

    • Re:Why ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by should_be_linear (779431) on Friday July 04, @07:32AM (#24057241)
      This is where Java shines. In C++, you can use platform-independent frameworks, but still you need for each and every platform to setup (possibly virtual) machine with compilation build-chain, installation process, and you better test if final result really works or some library is missing. Assuming you don't use 64-bit version of each platform, which doubles maintenance/QA effort. After all this you just *hope* you don't recieve that "Your app regularly crash on my FreeBSD x.y.z !" e-mail. For big projects like KDE/KOffice obviously this is problem, hence delay of KOffice Windows version, for small development team it is *huge* problem. This is why I really love Java, I almost forgot all STL incompatibility issues and C++ compiler nuances. Its not that Java program cannot behave different on various platforms, its that I encountered it once for last 3 years, and its fixed already in Java 6.

  • Review? Really? (Score:5, Informative)

    by knutert (1142047) on Friday July 04, @05:45AM (#24056715)
    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.

  • Unique (Score:4, Interesting)

    by spectrokid (660550) on Friday July 04, @05:54AM (#24056769) Homepage
    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.

  • One slight problem... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by madenglishbloke (829598) on Friday July 04, @06:02AM (#24056797)
    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.

    • I'll second that! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gazzonyx (982402) on Friday July 04, @06:32AM (#24056957)
      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.

      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 .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!

      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.

  • FLOSS flood (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zarlino (985890) on Friday July 04, @06:16AM (#24056883) Homepage
    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...

  • 1997 called... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04, @06:33AM (#24056965)

    ... and they want their UI back.

  • Good Free Software WordPro Recommendation? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wrook (134116) on Friday July 04, @06:47AM (#24057021) Homepage

    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?

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