KDE Readies KOffice 2.0 As OpenOffice Competitor

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.

KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Anonymous Coward]

The main benefit KOffice 2.0 brings is that it's sleek and fast. Unlike OpenOffice.org, KOffice has a very sensible architecture. Now, part of that is because KOffice is a far newer application. It builds directly on top of Qt, rather than implementing its own UI layer (like OpenOffice.org does). It also has a far more sensible component model, that suffers from only a small fraction of the bloat of the OO.o model.

While OpenOffice.org may have a larger feature set at this point, it just won't be able to compete with KOffice when it comes to being responsive and memory-efficient. Having built the KOffice source code from SVN just last week, I can tell you that you'll notice the difference immediately. OpenOffice.org just feels really damn sluggish, while KOffice is quick.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[Taxman415a]

You're not kidding. This article made me think to go install v 1.6. On a 1.8 Ghz processor running Gnome, Kword for ex opens extremely quickly and opens files quickly as well. This gives me hope that the rest of the codebase is that lean and clean and that it can eventually outdo oo.org. Hopefully it can start to hit critical mass to achieve greater developer mindshare. It's already got oo.org beat in code quality it seems, so hopefully soon in features.

I can certainly say the formula editor is miles ahead of oo.org's in terms of ease of use. I get a font error right away though in starting the formula editor, so I guess I'm off to file a bug report.

Re:

[Aladrin]

I installed it when I learned of Krita because I wanted to try it out. I had some issues with opening a file (forget what kind now) and tried KOffice and was very surprised to learn it not only opened it, but did it fast.

It has been my office app of choice since then.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[BRSloth]

As long as you run KDE, I guess. Otherwise, it will take a much longer startup just to put every single daemon KDE uses and load all other libraries.

In the end, I guess it is fast for KDE users; people using other desktop environments will see no difference.

[Just guessing here, from my experience with older KOffice parts running inside GNOME. Yes, they run and will still run.]

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

Hey, isn't that a bit like IE on Windows?

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[eean]

You underestimate how huge OpenOffice is. Its codebase might even be bigger then the entire KDE project. Since OpenOffice has its own (crappy) crossplatform GUI system, its pretty much a DE in its own right.

Re:KOffice 2.0 is FAST!

[theguyfromsaturn]

And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images. Scribus is also nice to import PostScript (why not PDFs?...) and respect the layout, but the text is usually broken down into individual characters. KWord does a great job with it. All in all, they each do their own job. It has allowed me to save some documents whose original editable copies got lost somehow... and for which I only had the PDF left. It's not as good as OOo at opening MS Office documents though, and the equations from ODF files aren't imported yet, but it's awesoooome.

Re:

[arth1]

It's not as good as OOo at opening MS Office documents though

This might be the biggest block, cause you usually can't demand that everyone sends you documents in other formats -- they will use Word, Excel and Powerpoint, (and have Outlook convert pictures to multi-megabyte BMP files too, for that matter).

Re:

[ortholattice]

And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded images.

It would be nice would to have completely clean PDF to ODF conversion, preferable integrated with KOffice and OO.org of course, but even stand-alone version would be useful. Is ODF theoretically capable of exactly representing a PDF? Both specs are open, so there shouldn't be the undocumented proprietary fo

PDF to ODF conversion

[bdubSOv1iKIJ403M]

Converting a PDF document into an editable form is like taking a screenshot of slashdot and trying to reconstruct what the HTML and CSS was.

Postscript, the precurser to PDF, is basically a layout system; draw a string here, draw a string there, etc. It is very good at preserving layout. However, some information is lost. Consider an embedded table, for instance. In the original document, a table might be defined with

-table
    -row
        -Firstname
        -Lastname
      -row
          Jack
          Bauer
      -row
          Anonymous
          Coward
-endtable

Once converted to pdf, it might be represented by

Drawline(200,200,400,200)
Drawline(200,300,400,300)
Drawline(200,400,400,400)
Drawline(200,500,400,500)

Drawline(200,200,200,400)
Drawline(300,200,300,400)
Drawline(400,200,400,400)

PaintString("Firstname", 200,400)
PaintString("Lastname", 300,400)
PaintString("Jack", 200, 300)
PaintString("Bauer", 300, 300)
PaintString("Anonymous", 200, 200)
PaintString("Coward", 300, 200)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

$pdf2ps document.pdf

(Part of ghostscript.)

Re:

[sumdumass]

Now if I could just get Koffice to work in windows....

I like the Idea of lean and fast. Actually, I love it, both MS-office and open office are hogs of sorts. But I need to cross platforms more often then I would like. It does me little good to get used to something if I can't use it and take it with me so to speak.

Re:

[timeOday]

I think OpenOffice is the only program I've ever considered abandoning ONLY because it runs so slowly. On a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo I can watch each individual icon redraw (not a good thing). It goes well beyond typical bloat, it must be something with the widget set or how they are using it. Maybe it makes heavy use of some instruction that's horribly slow on my particular video card, I don't know. But for me, the performance of OpenOffice leaves a big gap open for KOffice.

Go for the gold

[jpfed]

Computerworld reports that KOffice 2.0 will be leaner, faster, and enjoy a cleaner code base than OpenOffice.

I'm glad they're setting the bar high for themselves.

freedom not numbers

[wizardforce]

If it doesn't work in Windows, it will only see a fraction of the OO.o market.

The point of the open source movement was to ensure people have a choice. make software better and open and hopefully that will make it common. If Koffice can do better than Openoffice then they'll have the attention of at least the /.ers here :)

Re:freedom not numbers

[QuantumG]

The point of the open source movement was to ensure people have a choice.

False.

The point of the "open source" movement is to improve the way software is developed by opening it up and distributing it.

The point of the "free software" movement is to ensure that software is freely redistributable, and modifiable by the users of the software.

As for this "choice" thing you're talking about. That's the function of the market isn't it? Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"?

Uh...he's right

[tjstork]

As for this "choice" thing you're talking about. That's the function of the market isn't it? Wouldn't just proprietary software give people "choice"?

If open source didn't give people more choices, would there really be any point to it?

Freedom is not the most important criterion

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Choice between two or three broken apps is not as important as having at least one very good app that works well.

Multi-platform is vital for helping a transition off MS and onto Linux or whatever. I use OO to edit docs and it just does not matter to me whether I use Windows or Linux. In essence all I care about is that it is an OO-capable machine.

i hope the database app delivers

[siddesu]

i tried 1.6 some time ago -- mostly because i needed something access-like on Linux. the database app on the surface looks a lot better than the horror the ooo thingy, except that it didn't work with pre-existing sql databases. one has to create a database from scratch, and there wasn't an easy (UI) way to even hookup an existing database after one creates a custom one. since my needs were really simple, i gave up, and instead used knoda (http://www.knoda.org/) which is similar, and works nicely for the kind of thing I needed.

the rest of the office implemenation seemed to almost work. of course, it wasn't completely compatible with OO, but i liked the interface better and would have used it if it had a useful PDF output. However the PDF i got out of it was really jagged (the letters jumping up and down around the line), and the opinion on the mailing list was at the time 'it isn't our problem', so I switched back to OO in the end.

I hope 2.0 delivers. I'll give it a try anyway :)

Please try my database libraries / app

[vandan]

I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now. It's a suite of open-source, cross-platform Perl libraries, using Gtk2 for the GUI. The old website ( complete ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/ [homelinux.org]. I'm right now working on a revamped website ( incomplete, but with up-to-date download links and new screenshots ) is at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_new/ [homelinux.org].

There are 3 main components: a form object, a datasheet object, and a reporting module ( which exports to PDF via PDF::API2 ). I'm also working on a GUI object builder that exports XML for all 3 objects. Click on the 'future' link to see some screenshots of it in action. Note that I'm also looking for developers to help out, and maybe create a commercial project out of it ( I'm as-yet undecided whether to do this or not ).

I've had a number of large, complex production systems built on these libraries in use for about 2 years now. Please try it out, comment, report bugs, help out ... :)

Re:

[siddesu]

yay perl. if it has DBIx::Class support (or one can be rigged easily) i'm sold. i'll look it over the weekend, thanks for the plug :-D

Re:

[vandan]

It doesn't current have DBIx::Class support ( as I've never used DBIx::Class ), but I'm open to using it as long as it doesn't break backwards compatibility. I'll investigate.

slightly offtopic ... but

[siddesu]

while i was mostly kidding, DBIx::Class is a neat ORM framework. you may want to take a look at how it is integrated into the Catalyst framework -- it is quite a pleasure to use the combination.

Re:Please try my database libraries / app

[Steauengeglase]

"I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now."

I think you are a little late to the party. Didn't Access commit suicide like 5 years ago?

Re:

[vandan]

Didn't Access commit suicide like 5 years ago?

:)

Actually, it was basically abandoned after Access 2.0. What's been added since then ( apart from Product Activation )?.

Re:

[caseih]

Excellent news. I wonder how hard it would be to write, say, FreeBASIC wrappers for the perl API. Most people coming from Access are not going to be very experienced with or keen on perl, but they are familiar with VBA, and FreeBASIC would be at least remotely familiar to them. I use python almost exclusively myself and would love to have libraries like yours for developing rapid database GUI apps. I remember a while back a Qt-based app that used python for RAD database development. It was commercial I

Re:

[vandan]

I wonder how hard it would be to write, say, FreeBASIC wrappers for the perl API. Most people coming from Access are not going to be very experienced with or keen on perl, but they are familiar with VBA, and FreeBASIC would be at least remotely familiar to them.

Well ... um ... you can't mix Perl and FreeBASIC, as far as I know. Nor do I really want to, and I'm certainly not rewriting the whole thing in Basic ... certainly not ...

You're correct that a lot of Access users want to continue using some form

Re:

[Bluesman]

Perl's a natural fit for people who already know BASIC -- lots of $ all over, doesn't enforce any particular programming style, not particularly object oriented, etc.

Re:

[PCM2]

I've been working on my own Access-killer for a couple of years now. It's a suite of open-source, cross-platform Perl libraries, using Gtk2 for the GUI.

Hmmmm. Let's see ... implement my system in Access... or implement it in Perl. Implement it in Access ... or implement it in Perl. Access. Or Perl. Access. Perl. Damn, I'm going to need a couple beers to figure this one out.

Re:

[vandan]

On a personal note, I'm disappointed that it is written in Perl and the author thinks that Python has some "very strange ideas" such as "everything is an object" (OO languages aren't strange anymore). Makes me scared of what the code looks like underneath, but honestly, if it works and works WELL than I don't really care unless I have to dig in and change something. (o:

WTF dude? This is the 2nd post that's complained about my attitude to OO languages, whereas I said nothing of the sort. I said that Pyth

I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suites

[greenguy]

I'm a Gnome user (after road-testing KDE for a good six months), but I've been infected with the hype about KDE 4, and in particular, Koffice. If it's really as good as they say, there's a good chance I'll switch over. My job uses Macs, and I've found NeoOffice too unstable to use (four crashes in two hours). Supposedly, there will be a Mac OS X-native version of Koffice, which would fit the bill to replace friggin' MS Office.

My fallback -- and I'd just like to take this opportunity to veer off-topic, here -- is to put Ubuntu on a used CPU and run LTSP, with the Macs as thick clients. One way or another, I can't stand to see my office sink any more money into proprietary software.

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[JanneM]

Just run KOffice under Gnome. It's not like either the KDE nor Gnome libraries are particularly large or anything by today's standards; the resource requirements of a large app (or just the Java vm) is totally dominant by comparison.

That said, for wp I much prefer Abiword; it's not nearly as full-featured, of course, but apart from the lack of real handling of Japanese fonts and input (it works but is a hassle since you need to switch to a capable font manually) it does everything I ever use. Gnumeric is th

Re:I, for one, welcome more ODF-based office suite

[dbIII]

What a lot of people miss is that you can run the kde apps on gnome and vice versa. You can run Koffice without changing anything else. Both gnome and KDE have good and bad points. I have a few people stuck on base RHEL3 at the insistance of the vendor of a commercial app that needs a lot of support and with that release gnome is very unstable so those users are on KDE. More recent versions of gnome are a lot better and people run a variety of kde applications on their gnome desktops.

Re:

[greenguy]

I haven't missed that (JanneM, take note). I've done it... I just wasn't that impressed with KOffice as it is currently. It isn't bad, it just isn't better than OOo, and it doesn't yet support ODF. That's why I have high hopes for 2.0, because I'd love to have a cross-platform suite that supports ODF.

Heck, I hardly use an office suite at all. I spend most of my time in Firefox, Scribus, and Inkscape. My officemates, on the other hand, use Word and/or Excel all day, every day. It's really them I need to conv

That's all good. Except...

[mpapet]

There's still no "print selection" option in the printer gui interface. This leads me to believe that there will be more of the same gotchas littered all over koffice. Noble effort though. Keep up the good work.

And while you are at it, please work on the print selection thingy sometime eh?

Re:

[oyenstikker]

I print selection more often than I print [the whole document].

Re:That's all good. Except...

[rduke15]

I actually knew someone who definitely needed "print selection". He had never heard of the concept of files, much less folders. He had ONE Word document on his Mac desktop, and only ever typed into that. Then he would select the part he needed and print that. I'm not kidding! Luckily, I was in a hurry and was able to refrain from getting into helping him. Anyway, he didn't want or need help. I have no idea how it ended, and whether eventually someone showed him the light. But maybe he wouldn't have been interested. It worked for him, with all his writings in a single huge Word file...

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

I've never heard of such a thing and I've used Word all my life (just checked and sure enough there it is). I've always put stuff on its own page and printed those page(s).

Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[Zombie Ryushu]

Why is it that Kontact does not have KOffice integration and Kerberos support. Kontact+eGroupware would be an Exchange Killer IF Kontact and eGroupware supported Kerberos so that I don't have to setup kwallet with Domain login and passwords for remote Calendars/Tasks/Address Book with XML-RPC.

Why no love of Kerberos!

Re:Slightly off topic, but related, Kontact

[nine-times]

Why no love of Kerberos!

Especially since it already starts with a "K"!

Native Mac Version

[javacowboy]

KOffice 2.0 will run natively on OS X:

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/02/1930232 [slashdot.org]

This will benefit Mac users tremendously, as NeoOffice is too bloated (although making good progress at getting more efficient) and the native version of OpenOffice is probably several months away at best.

There is no lean, simple free and/or open source spreadsheet app for Mac yet. When KOffice 2.0 comes out, cheap Mac users (like me) will have more choice. When MS Office 2007 comes out for Mac in January 2008 (sorry, had to poke fun at Microsoft :D ), and iWork 2008 out starting last month, Mac users willing to pay for a good office suite will have even more choice.

This will also benefit the KDE team, as their installed based will expand by one (and possibly two) OS's, giving them more bug reports and feature requests.

Everybody wins!

My office will be even -better-.

[tjstork]

In 2009, I will ship my office suite, Stork Office. It will be fully open source, be even leaner than koffice, and not have the stupid Access-like tools. Then, if KDE isn't finished their 4.0 desktop, and fix the register view in KDevelop, I may just write my own GUI and IDE to go with it, for release in 2009. Oh, and I'll have Duke Nukem Forever as a game that ships with my system!

Can it open OOXML files?

[C3ntaur]

I don't care what bells and whistles are added, what shiny new GUI paint is applied, how much faster the app runs, etc, etc, etc. Office 2007 is on the street, and we are going to be hit with a barrage of OOXML files that can't be opened by anybody who's not running Microsoft. Any contender in this space needs to address this problem, and right now.

Re:

[C3ntaur]

These projects are all odf converters, mostly MS Office plugins. They do not make it possible to open OOXML in anything other than MS Office.

Its all good!

[mlwmohawk]

This is what standards are all about, [N] groups using 1 standard makes for *competition* may the best ideas win!!

cut out the crap

[m2943]

I would use more KDE applications if they didn't insist on starting up half the KDE desktop environment, starting up slowly, and printing all that crap. I don't want "kio" or "ksycoca" or whatever running in the background just because I'm editing a text file. And often,

Why the hell can't KDE (and Gnome, for that matter) do this stuff in-process?

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[zsouthboy]

RTFA:
KDE 4's framework is cross-platform.
They plan to release this on Windows as well.

Re:

[teh moges]

This is good news. I've been looking for a word processor with a good set of features without the bloat. I've been trying KOffice for a little while now, not quite used to it yet, but it is looking to take over, at least for myself. Reading on the features that will be available soon, I'm really looking forward to this release.

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[japhmi]

From the fine article, first paragraph.

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X

Re:"Competitor" my ass...

[Kjella]

And just to expand on that, there are really several different things going on:
1) Qt 4, the underlying system library is now dual licensed GPL/commercial on the Windows platform by Trolltech, before only commercial on Windows.
2) As a result, the kdelibs (the core KDE libraries) for KDE4 has been made cross-platform. Like KDE4, they're still unreleased (at beta 2 still I think) but I did manage to get a KApplication compiled and running on Windows.
3) Since the KDE libraries are going cross-platform, so is all KDE applications that doesn't have additional *nix-specific dependencies. Note that KDE is trying to be a complete application framework not just an UI library, so this should be true for most.
4) Since the move from KDE3 to KDE4 is major, most applications like KOffice are also doing major rewrites not only because of the framework changes but also "if you want to change and break something, now's the time".

End result? Well it's always though to say with unreleased software but the general idea is that it'll be a three-pronged attack:
1. It's now cross-platform, so new markets
2. All applications should see a 20-30% speed improvement because of library improvements
3. Major new version with new features

Only downside is that it's taking quite long - Qt 4.0 was released in June 2005, though in personal experience it was a poor release but none the less it's taken a few years and KDE4 is still in development. The release of KDE4 is scheduled for December 11th, and I'm very much looking forward to it. It should bring the Gnome vs KDE flamefest to new heights :D.

Re:

[AJWM]

KOffice also opens MS docs and spreadsheets, and can save in .doc or .xls format. I don't know how well that is supported in terms of very elaborate stuff, but the docs and spreadsheets readily accessible to me here worked fine.

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

Unfortunately OOo supports Office 2007 (via plugins) while KOffice currently doesn't and isn't going to support it natively. So unless KOffice also gets its own plugin, people will be stuck with installing wither both KOffice and OOo or just OOo.

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[fimbulvetr]

You know if you took a few seconds to research something you're writing - or even speaking - about, it may help others think you're not such a dumbass. You might even up your intelligence. Alas, this is slashdot. The barrier of entry for intelligence here is so low, you don't even need to remember your username to post.

Here, check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit) [wikipedia.org]

(That's a link, you can click it and it will take you to another place on the internet). As you can see, QT4 is ported to Windows, and other non-x11 OSs. In an amazing twist of coincidences, Koffice is written in QT4.

Re:It doesnt compete with anything

[cammoblammo]

viola

Just what is it that slashdotters find so interesting about medium sized stringed instruments?

Re:

[Bluesman]

I propose we adopt a new standard. Viola is getting old.

Cello!

Re:

[kyofunikushimi]

Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than "Microsoft Office" and "Open Office dot Org", they threw in the towel. Seriously, it's an office suite. Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.

Re:

[vux984]

Because once they realized they'd need a name MORE CLEVER than ..

This isn't about clever.

Its name doesn't need to elicit feelings of euphoria or anything.

No, but its name shouldn't elicit feelings of mediocre, lower quality, and bargain basement cheap.

In Canada and much of the US at least, the store "K-mart" is a widely known 'walmart-like' store that's known for being a 'cheap/bargain department store'.

And he's suggesting a K-"product" like KOffice picks up on that K association. Sort of like naming it McO

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

Whenever I hear KOffice or KMail I do not think of K-Mart. Guess it isn't as ingrained as you think. It'd be like saying GMail is a bad name because it makes people think of gangsters.

Re:why don't they think of a catchy name

[westlake]

The "K-" line of apps has all the cachet of Sam's Club or President's Choice. Why plant the presumption of value product mediocrity in people's minds before they even try it?

At least you have been spared the pain of trying to bring credibility in marketing to The Gimp.

Re:

[couchslug]

"K-" IS a Katchy Komputer Konvention.
Now if you'll excuse me, the Kleagle has kalled me to the Klavern.

Re:

[davester666]

iOffice!

Seriously, anyone remember those krappy khrysler k-cars?

Re:Why don't we think of a catchy name?

[holloway]

OfficeSweet.

Re:

[cmacb]

Because if it doesn't start with a "K" us KDE folk won't recognize it as oK to use.

GNOME or other wms

[owlman17]

Will it work on GNOME or Xfce? I'm currently using Icewm. Do you have to install KDE for this one? Or just the KDE libs? (Would still be a large dl even if just the latter.)

Re:

[QuantumG]

You're not kidding:

sudo apt-get install koffice
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
karbon kchart kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a kexi kformula kivio kivio-data
koffice-data koffice-libs koshell kplato kpresenter kpresenter-data krita
krita-data kspread kthesaurus kugar kword kword-data libarts1c2a
libavahi-qt3-1 libopenexr2c2a libpoppler1 libpoppler1-gli

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Bogtha]

A lot of those packages are simply the individual applications and their supporting data. Once you ignore those, the required supporting packages are simply:

• kdelibs-data, kdelibs4c2a, libarts1c2a - the KDE libraries and sound daemon.
• libavahi-qt3-1 - support library for Rendevous/Bonjour/whatever it's called these days that makes network service autodiscovery work.
• libopenexr2c2a - support library for the EXR image format.
• libpoppler1, libpoppler1-glib, libpoppler1-qt - support library for PDFs.
• libruby1.8 - support library for scripting.
• libwv2-1c2 - support library for Word document format.

The rest of the packages are optional. Furthermore, if you only want a couple of the applications, e.g. KWord, you can install them individually. And of course, on a KDE desktop, you'll already have much of this installed anyway. Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad.

Re:

[QuantumG]

What do you need a sound daemon for an office package for?

That should be optional. Same with the network discovery crap.

I don't even *know* what the EXR image format is..

PDF support, yes, fair enough.

Ruby seems like a strange choice for a scripting language for an office package, but ok.

And yes, obviously you want the Word document support.

Considering the size of things like OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, I'd say that's not too bad.

But it's not good either.

Re:GNOME or other wms

[Bogtha]

What do you need a sound daemon for an office package for?

That should be optional. Same with the network discovery crap.

Blame your distribution. They are optional. Whoever packaged it for your distribution decided that they should be required. I have KOffice installed, and I haven't got all of those packages installed.

Re:

[waferhead]

That list of deps (installing Koffice on a Gnome based system) is about the same size as installing only Gnumeric (which is largely Gnome based) on a simple KDE based system.

Hard drive space is cheap.

Re:

[QuantumG]

Umm, so? My point is that KOffice most likely doesn't need all that stuff, it's just a granularity issue. The kde libs need to be broken up.. as do basically any library that gets over 5 or 10 meg.

Re:

[QuantumG]

Why? I'd rather compare it to the best possible.

It's called the gold standard, and I wish more people would learn it.

Re:

[Secrity]

A native port of KDE on windows was started about two years ago; I don't recall seeing anything come of it. Personally, I see no reason for it to be ported to Windows.

Re:

[MORB]

The difference lies in the Qt4 licensing versus Qt3.
Qt3 was available with a GPL license only for X11, so the previous effort to port KDE to windows had to reimplement a GPL version of Qt for win32 from scratch, which is quite a big undertaking.

Qt4 is available under the GPL for every platform, so that big roadblock is cleared. And the KDE project is officially supporting and ecouraging the win32 port this time.
Also, some other things like KDE switching to a much nicer and cross platform build system than a

Re:

[nine-times]

Or how about OSX? I've heard something about QT offering easy porting to OSX... any truth there?

Honestly, I think having good ports on Linux, OSX, and Windows is a big deal. I believe it's part of the reason Firefox has been successful. Users can use the same app on any platform and have the same features, same rendering, same behavior, and roughly the same interface. From an IT standpoint, it's ideal since it cuts down on support/training issues. OpenOffice seems to be the only office suite with that

Re:

[abigor]

Yes, I've run early alpha versions of KDE 4 apps on OS X. You can google for build instructions, but a word of warning - they are still in heavy development, so there will be problems. Simple apps like KEdit work fine though. After KDE 4 is released, there will be dedicated OS X builds for these apps and KOffice that will be simple to download and install.

Wait until the New Year, and give them a try ;)

Re:

[taniwha]

because competition is good - not the 'lets be like' windows sort of competition - the 'ooh look those guys over there are doing something neat, lets see if we can do better' sort - MS is so big they move like a snail on valium these days - a couple of hotshots trying to out do each other is a great thing for all of us

remember that Koffice is not new - here they are announcing their goals for their 2.0 release - I run my company on their spread sheet and the occasional times I need to use a word processo

But reinventing the wheel is pointless ...

[golodh]

This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.

And if the task to be done, spreadsheeting and writing documents, letters, and reports is known, then where is the percentage of redoing the whole thing from scratch?

There is a very good reason why MS Office has such a high marketshare: it does the job, without too much fuss, and people

Re:

[lahvak]

This mantra about "competition is good" misses the point that (a) you need lots of (working) features before you get a decent Office software package and (b) the task to be done is well-known and hasn't changed for years.

True, the task is well known and it hasn't changed much, but it has never been solved well. With every new release of every office suit in existence, I hear that their new version does things "the right way". I get my hopes up, give it a try, and so far I have been always completely disa

That's the right way to improve software

[golodh]

I think you are doing this the right way: start with the task you need done, see how existing software measures up, note where it falls short.

I'm sorry to hear that current Office software fails you. Now if you could only describe how and why the software you use doesn't measure up to your expectations that might be valuable input for developers.

But it's a totally different approach from the gushing: "Gee lets redo the whole darn thing, lets code the interface in Qt4 and gosh lets rejoice over what a ni

Re:

[steveoc]

I really beg to differ with you in so many fundamental ways.

Firstly - MS-Office, for a start, gained a high market share by the simple fact that all of the competing products were systematically removed from the market as options, and their manufacturers sent to the wall through highly dubious tactics. Thats just for starters.

MS-Office maintains a high market share by the simple fact that the data that it spits out is in an undocumented (and ever changing) format, so competing implementations are not even p

Re:

[fimbulvetr]

While I'm sure you enjoy being able to prepare and cook your favorite Peking Duck variation while opening OpenOffice, Koffice will provide competition and hopefully some innovation on the code side which is next to impossible to get into openoffice using your standard submit patches procedures. It can be the coolest and tightest integration/innovation in the entire niche and Sun won't accept it unless you kiss their ass. This, and they accept shitty, buggy internal patches from half assed coders from their

Re:

[Bob54321]

Bit of an exaggeration... my laptop boots in 15-20sec and OOo takes 5sec to open (Arch Linux).

Re:

[EvilRyry]

15 seconds? My 4 year old laptop running gusty can get a cold start on OOo in about 5 seconds. Subsequent startups take about 2-3 seconds. Of course this is still an eternity compared to the near-instant starts of MS Office though.

Re:

[socsoc]

near-instant starts of MS Office though.

This must be a new version I never heard of. My userbase has installs of 2k, 2k2, 2k3 and 2k7 and constantly bitch about the speed it takes to open a file. Maybe we should revert back to 97 in an effort to find the version you are speaking about. My OOo boots faster than MS office.

Re:

[MoxFulder]

Well... I must be doing something wrong, cause I get way slower times on way newer systems. Ubuntu Feisty, 2.0ghz Turion 64 x2, 1gb RAM. It still takes TEN SECONDS to cold-start OO.o to a blank document, and about 3 for subsequent starts. And on my 2ghz Athlon 64 with only 512mb RAM, it takes about thirty seconds. It's ridiculous.

OO.o has truly amazingly good MS Office import/export... it even gets equations and PowerPoint animations right most of the time!! And it runs snappy with 100-page documents w

Re:

[CastrTroy]

I use access all the time when people send me CSV files that have more than 65,000 rows in them, and therefore won't open in most spreadsheets. It's nice for one-time-use databases or just doing simple queries on csv files that clients have sent you. I wouldn't use it for any kind of permanent database, but that's usually how access applications get started, Somebody needs a quick and dirty database to use for a week to analyze some data, and 3 years later, it's still running, because somebody thought it

Re:

[rduke15]

That's precisely why Access is great. Once you realize the database is still there after a few years and has become important, you keep the Access GUI and move the data out into a "real database".

Access

[rduke15]

I can't think of a single good reason to use Access (or Access-like databases). Can somebody tell me what sort of applications would actually call for a wretchedly limited application like that?

I cannot quite understand how you cannot see what Access is used for. When you need a databse application with a GUI, what do you build the GUI with? HTML? That's fine for many tings, as the web demonstrates. But for a real desktop GUI application, what do you suggest instead of Access? Perl/Tk? C++? Visual Basic?

Des

Re:

[vandan]

Try my project as as Access replacement:

http://entropy.homelinux.org/ [homelinux.org]. I'm also working on a new website ( with updated screenshots and also snapshots of the libraries ), at: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis_new [homelinux.org].

It's written in Perl, and uses Gtk2 for the GUI. It's open-source and cross-platform, and soon will get a GUI object builder ( click the 'future' link for some screenshots ).

Re:

[dtecmeister]

Another great reason for an Access replacement is to be able to improve on it. Access is very good for quickly making front-ends, but it has many areas that could be improved on. This is an excellent opportunity for a killer app. to step in and fill the gaps.

Re:

[MoxFulder]

Anyways, I have a question. I can't think of a single good reason to use Access (or Access-like databases). Can somebody tell me what sort of applications would actually call for a wretchedly limited application like that?

Access *is* truly wretched as far as an actual DB backend. The early versions of MySQL were far more powerful and fast, for example. But the real killer feature of Access is the ability to create tables and interfaces to them graphically. It's actually very good at that, and I haven't seen a decent replacement for Linux. A non-technical person can sit down with Access and make, say, a database of their recipes, or book collection, or company purchase orders... and make a decent GUI to do CRUD on it.

For

Re:

[Bob The Cowboy]

The link you pointed to shows Pixel is proprietary... I imagine this might be a problem for its inclusion into KOffice (which already includes the much-loved Krita)

Kexi is already the Access-like db-app, and I believe they already use Kivio for their flowcharting app. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I just wanted to point out that they (the KOffice folk) aren't building their own KOffice apps when other KDE apps already exist.

Bill

Re:

[AJWM]

KOffice already has Kivio [koffice.org] for flowcharting. QCad strikes me as a bit of overkill for this. It (kivio) could stand to expand its stencil library but it's supposed to support Dia stencils too.

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

What about a Vector graphic editing tool? All tools I've seen except for Flash deal with raster graphics only.

Re:

[AJWM]

What about a Vector graphic editing tool?

That would be Karbon14 [koffice.org]. (KDE seems to have gone through a few iterations of vector graphic tools, or maybe the same tool under different names. I know KIllustrator was renamed because of pressure from Adobe, to Kontour. And there was a Krayon in there too. I don't know how many of these may actually have been different codebases.)

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

While I can't speak volumes about Gnome and GTK. I can say that you views of KDE and QT do not appear to be based on facts, but more assumptions and preconceived notions.

KDE is NOT simply QT plus bloat, the goals of the KDE library are to provide a consistent API to applications to work well with the KDE desktop. In the grand scheme of things it is actually very light as far as things it adds to QTs very complete API. For example, it will provide a KPushButton which inherits from the QPushButton class to add a few small integration features. Also KDE offers many common widget combinations as a reusable widget in itself, this is good library design as a whole. Making libraries of reusable code is a GOOD THING.

Don't mis-interpret this as KDE zealotry, I imagine that Gnome provides some sort of API to help applications integrate well with the desktop as well.

And what is your general issue with using c++ and moc? I hate to break it to you, but moc IS "real c++". There is nothing wrong with having utilities to generate code, there is huge gain to doing it with moc instead of templates...runtime bindings. moc just hides these details for you, and to be honest, you usually don't even have to worry about it at all if you use the QT build system.

As for what is wrong with GTK + C? Well nothing is wrong with it but it's not the only choice. One thing to keep in mind though is that graphical displays usually consist of conceptual objects "windows", "buttons", "listboxes", "textboxes", etc. These are all "things" which to be honest, creating code to describe "things" is what object oriented programming excels at.

You will never see a port to GTK of KOffice because it would not be a port, but a litteral re-write as the whole code base is built around the KDE/QT libraries.

And why not start with AbiWord? Heh, this statement is a shinning example of a preference not based on the merits of what you want, but instead on an arbitrary dislike for the competition. You are of course entitled to your opinion, nothing is perfect. But you provide no real reason why something built on KDE libraries is inherently bad. Secondly, Abiword is a single word processor application with no integration into an "office solution". KOffice is looking to provide the whole shebang.

I imagine you are going to reply with "KDE is bloated", "KDE is slow". But these generalizations aren't really based on real facts. KDE is actually quite lean (and KDE 4.0 is going to be leaner because QT 4.0 is a vast improvement of 3.0). Its memory usage is nothing crazy, the reason for this is that there is a LOT of code reuse. Using the KDE libraries is effectively "free" as far as memory usage goes because modern operating systems do code sharing of dynamic libraries and the whole damn desktop uses these libraries! There are benchmarks that show that Gnome and KDE are actually quite comparable: http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/memory/desktop_benchmark.html [kde.org]

I'll even not go so far as to say KDE is better than Gnome in memory usage because I know that there are many factors and a single set of benchmarks by one person doesn't really prove much...but it does show that they are at least in the same ballpark.

All in all, I find your argument against using a modern library not founded in facts :(

proxy

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

> While I can't speak volumes about Gnome and GTK. I can say that you views of KDE and QT do not appear to be based on facts, but more assumptions and preconceived notions.

My views are based on my experience with KDE.
I was a KDE and supporter from the start.
I switched to XFCE. I have tried GNOME, but it's not for me currently.

> KDE is NOT simply QT plus bloat, the goals of the KDE library are to provide a consistent API to applications to work well with the KDE desktop. ...
> Don't mis-interpret thi

Re:

[Qwavel]

What is wrong with the development tech behind the new KOffice?

Well, speaking as a C++ developer, the first problem is that the new QT is a serious attack on the C++ standard. Yes, I know that everyone will say that the C++ standard is bad and that QT4 has done it better, but that's what the MS people always said when they ignored standards. Standards don't always represent the best solution for you, but sticking to the standard benefits everyone. Now that the QT people have decided to do things their ow

Re:Would rather it be GTK or Qt based.

[Pr0xY]

surely, in fact, the linux kernel uses object oriented programming in things like the VFS layer. The thing is, doing OOP in C is no more efficient than C++, it really is just a matter of syntax. And if you have a language which gives you OOP and is generally efficient..then why not use it.

It's just another tool in the toolbox, i like using many languages and it's just a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.

Re:

[speaker of the truth]

At least it doesn't have a URL for a name.