The KOffice team has released KOffice 1.6.3. “This is the last maintenance release of the 1.6 series, containing mainly bug fixes. There are bug fixes for almost all of the components. See the complete changelog for the complete information.”
The KOffice team has released KOffice 1.6.3. “This is the last maintenance release of the 1.6 series, containing mainly bug fixes. There are bug fixes for almost all of the components. See the complete changelog for the complete information.”
can’t wait for two.
Together with the KDE, a very good home user compliant desktop exists. This will lead Linux (and UNIX) to more and more usage share on the home user’s site. Installing OpenOffice may be unusual then, allthough I actually prefer OO over KO.
Great work, KOffice developers!
I just assume KOffice 2 running more slowly and making newer versions of KDE (such as 4) running too slow on older x86 boxes… 🙁
Since QT 4 uses significantly less resources than QT 3 running KOffice and only loading KDELibs into memory should see KOffice 2 run faster than the QT 3 versions. Assuming KOffice 2 does not need significant optimisation.
KDE 4 may also be lighter than KDE3 despite the increase in services because of QT 4.
I wouldn’t count on it. KDE 4 won’t be an 800 pound gorilla, but it won’t be very fast either. They sure benefit from the new Qt, but they also add a lot of features. Take Kstars as a nice example. Sure, drawing a line in Qt3 is slower than drawing one in Qt4. But Kstars also uses the new anti-aliasing in Qt4, thus you’re comparing a normal, cheap, jagged line in Qt3 with a heavy anti-aliased line in Qt4. MAYBE the second one will be faster, but it’s more likely it’ll be slower. This goes for many parts of KDE.
Sure, KDE will be fast, for what it offers. Like it always has been. But it might not be faster than KDE 3.
Of course, nothing is set in stone, and KDE 4.1 will most likely see a lot of optimisation.
I doubt KDE4 will be more responsitive than KDE3. Yes, I tested QT4 and it looks like it’s faster than its predecessor. That’s a good thing because some parts of KDE3/QT3 annoy me because of the lack of responsiveness.
On the other hand, KDE4 is made of a good amount of subsystems. Technically speaking, that’s a good thing. Code is more clean, less error-prone, easier to maintain, etc. However, this can make the whole system much slower (but still acceptable). That will depend on how much they use IPC to manage the whole thing I suppose..
It’s a shame that all changes made are not so important. I mean, most office users (small office, home office, even not office at all, just want to open the damn .doc a friend sent me) need Word and Excel compatibility. KWord still needs better Word documents handling, and KSpread is almost useless for real world sheets. I like both and use them if I don’t have to share documents. And I understand that supporting office formats is not so important for some developers, specially when Office 2007 came out recently with another format. But there isn’t even true good compatibility with OpenDocument. If I load a sheet created with OpenOffice (a real sheet, not some stupid test) most styles are completely screwed. I wish I could dump that beast once and for all.
I agree with you about all the needed features to having full compatibility with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, but we must take into account that KOffice is a project developed by volunteers that work on its features in their spare time. I do not know if there is some corporate support from some middle/large size company but it is more probable than there is not, so, we cannot criticize this project because its slow development cycle.
Maybe we can cooperate it in several ways: Using it (with all its current restrictions), reporting bugs, writing documentation, maybe doing translations, fixing bugs, adding useful modules, etc. The larger community the better software.
Edited 2007-06-08 15:36
For a project to have a great community, it needs to catch the user eye, for example Firefox. Firefox seduced the a community with its quality, KOffice in the other hand is an abobination, a low quality project and I could go on, so how about realising a functional project first and ask for community support later?
Edited 2007-06-08 15:44
what’s so extremely bad about it? True, it has seen some less stable releases a few years ago, and tables have never worked properly in KWord. I haven’t used KSpread that much, but KWord works fine for me. I can write two essays in the time OO.o starts, and I don’t want to use software which is so clearly crap. True, KOffice is far from perfect, many components aren’t that great, but it also has a few parts that are better than even many commercial components, like Kexi and Krita.
And if you had even a small look at what’s coming for KOffice 2.0, you’d think very different.
Or maybe you DID have a look, and you’re afraid your petproject, be it OO.o or Abiword/Gnumeric/etc are gonna bite the dust?
Oh, no, I don’t criticize it. I love KOffice with its problems. I really like it and use more KWord than Writer (in fact, I never really use Writer except when opening some doc KWord cannot read well). I find KWord a good word processor. Import/export filters suck a bit.
KSpread, in the other hand, even if it has its uses, has been bitten by some severe bugs that affected calculations. It’s difficult to trust a calculator that has miscalculated before. So you have to be careful when sharing sheets with others, because the results could be terrible. It happened to me with OpenOffice and its LOOKUPV (I think) function which worked well with OpenOffice, but the implementation was different in MS Office, thus rendering the results incorrect when opened by a MS Office user. A total mess. I could not tell which implementation was wrong (probably Excel’s one), but it doesn’t matter after all.
It’s not easy to share spreadsheets among different implementations and have the correct results, no matter what people think; you could have a mess in your hands, trust it and never find about it. I wonder how many people out there are haveing these problems without knowing.
To close, spreadsheets are a different animal than other office applications. The results may vary greatly depending on the functions used and how they are used/implemented. So, for me KSpread is not a choice. Probably Calc wouldn’t if my life depended on it.
Now you’re right, they didn’t want to spend a lot of energy on the ‘old’ MS Word format. BUT… apparently, Microsoft released the specs for their older formats!!! So it has become a lot easier to support it, thus there is hope 😉
I wouldn’t call implementing a 6000 pages (with a lot of reference to how other applications behaves) something easy to implement. I really doubt OOXML will be correctly supported in the near future, but it’s possible that it will be better than the binary Office files. But what we advocates is to keep the pressure on MsOffice and government to really support ISO and open standard like ODF for interoperability. That’s why even with the availability of the OOXML specification, not much effort will be put to support it.
I think he is referring to the thread on koffice-devel about Microsoft releasing specifications of its old formats, or new licencing terms for them
Yes, I was. I don’t expect to have perfect OOXML support. Let’s hope Thomas can exert some influence on it, to clear some things up…
If there is a Software in the Open Source world that is shame for being mediocre, unstable and a bad example is KOffice, specially KWord, KSpread and KPresenter, I won’t name the others because I haven’t tried them yet, honestly, how come a program with like 9 years of development is still such piece of crap in the basics? And the only thing that could save such pice of crap is Qt4 because it does most of the job for the mediocre developers, honestly KOffice developers find another job and give the project to real programers.
First, the KOffice developers are truely great hackers.
Second, KOffice is far from perfect, but it also has a few parts that are better than even many commercial components, like Kexi and Krita.
And if you had even a small look at what’s coming for KOffice 2.0, you’d think very different.
Or maybe you DID have a look, and you’re afraid your petproject, be it OO.o or Abiword/Gnumeric/etc are gonna bite the dust?
Actually, Gnumeric is a better spreadsheet than Calc and KSpread. I would go as far as to say it’s better than Excel (VBA???) for most users. I don’t know if it has any future…
I can surely believe that… I never use spreadsheets.
“””
I can surely believe that… I never use spreadsheets.
“””
To corrupt a quote from Henry Spencer for my own purposes:
“Those who do not understand databases are doomed to reinvent them, poorly… using spreadsheets.” 😉
Edited 2007-06-08 20:04
“””
And if you had even a small look at what’s coming for KOffice 2.0, you’d think very different.
Or maybe you DID have a look, and you’re afraid your petproject, be it OO.o or Abiword/Gnumeric/etc are gonna bite the dust?
“””
While I do not follow these things very closely, I have been kicking around a while. And I must confess that, considering the history of the KOffice project, it’s hard to imagine its competition shaking in their boots.
Unlike KDE itself, KOffice has not exactly been a major force. 😉
Absolutely true. The project has never seen that many contributors. Again, some parts are cool, but the ‘basic’ apps, KWord, KSpread and KPresenter are simply underdeveloped.
But the developers are integrating the parts of the suite much more closely, thus (some of) the work done on other parts benefits them all. As some parts DO have (a lot) very active developers, this might really help. Also, Thomas Zander has spend already months of his free time fully on KWord and the basic library development, and will continue to do so, to give KOffice 2.0 a nice kickstart. That’s where my high expectations come from 😉
Of course, if every part of KOffice was like Krita, nobody would even think of dismissing KOffice, but that’s just not the case. And won’t be. Still, I’ve seen a lot of energy and motivated hackers on the KOffice meeting in Berlin a few weeks ago. Also on other parts than Krita. And if KOffice can get the basics to work, it’ll have some very cool extra’s with KOffice 2 – which would make them a serious choice.
I don’t have a “Pet” project but looks like you like to adopt mediocricy as yours.
And if you had even a small look at what’s coming for KOffice 2.0, you’d think very different.
After 9 year of developing nothing but crap I really hope so if don’t better f–king retire.
First, the KOffice developers are truely great hackers.
Judgin for the mess KWord, KSpread and KPresenter are I don’t think so, but, aren’t you a KDE.org administrator? so if you spend more time helping you fellas instead of defeanding such crap in public forums maybe they can make it usable.
Edited 2007-06-08 19:22
Ok, I like KOffice. And it’s true, again, KOffice isn’t perfect. Personally, I have MS Office 2003, and I perfer it for most tasks. But for writing essay’s, KWord does a fine job, and again, I’m seeing a lot of new, innovative things in KOffice 2.
As I wrote below, KOffice doesn’t have enough developers, esp on KSpread and KPresenter, to get things really polished. Mediocre? Maybe some apps in there. But there are real gems, too.
And they’re doing a kick-ass job, considering the number of developers.
by the way, I didn’t vote you down. I do think you are pretty rude to those developers, so I’m not gonna vote you up either, but I don’t vote people down I’m having a discussion with.
if Koffice 2.0+ has two primary goals:
1) ODF
2) Office OpenXML,
and manages good OpenXML support before Openoffice.org then it has a very good shot at becoming the de-facto office suite for linux (and windows).
Openoffice.org would then become the office suite of choice for legacy .doc formats, but the future would belong to koffice.
like it or not, we live in a Microsoft world, and businesses must support their standards. i cannot not be able to open a document from a customer because i have gone all anal about free software standards.
as a consequence, i use openoffice.org on opensuse 10.1 at the moment, and would never dream of using koffice in an office environment.
i hope that might change one day………..
Edited 2007-06-08 15:22
I’m pretty sure KOffice 2 will be very cool, have a lot of innovative, unique stuff, but… I don’t know if it will get the basics right. I’ve heard tables support will most likely be basic, and they might just not have the developers to really polish it all up.
In order to get full compliance with another format, features that exist in that format must be available. OOo has better MS Office file format compatibility than I have seen from any other competing suite (using my own files for reference), but they haven’t achieved complete compatibility due to differences in features. The compatibility has been improving as features are being added.
On the other hand, even if Koffice were able to get perfect file format compatibility with their current feature set, they still wouldn’t be able to leap ahead in my opinion. It provides far better options than something like wordpad and especially notepad, but without a better well-rounded feature set for all of the components, people will still need to use other options for more complex tasks. One necessary feature is going to be Windows compatibility, and I know that’s coming. I’m looking forward to seeing that with the new libraries, but until that comes, I can’t use Koffice at work regardless of other features because at my office Windows is the only OS in existence.
I look forward to the day when Koffice is a serious alternative to other options, but even OOo doesn’t provide all of the features I need for my work environment. If either Koffice or OOo were able to provide a better complete solution for databases, presentations, and spreadsheets as well as documents, I might be able to consider them as an alternative. I haven’t played with Kexi. So, I don’t know how it compares, but Base just doesn’t stack up to Access in all the ways that it needs to. Impress has most of the features, but it has been too slow for me. Kpresenter doesn’t seem to have the features even if it weren’t too slow (regardless, it doesn’t run on Windows for now). Kspread just doesn’t come close to having all of the features. Calc has been improving, but charts have been a sore point (soon to see a big improvement). Writer meets my word processing needs, but I need more than just a word processor. Kword works for simple things, but once again, I just need it to do more than what it can do now.
Could Koffice or even OOo work for “grandma?” OOo already does in many cases, but it does show some signs of bloat (memory usage, slow load/save times) in some areas. Koffice might be good once it comes to Windows, but I can’t convince people to switch to Linux just for Koffice.
EDIT: minor clarification.
Edited 2007-06-09 13:59
Maybe we should be comparing Koffice to the productivity apps included with Windows. (ie: Wordpad, Paint, umm…hmm… I guess that’s it) … or even MS Works… it’s about on par with either.
Kolourpaint is already way beyond Paint, and Krita is more like almost on par with Photoshop…
Same goes for Kexi, it’s ahead of practically all competition.
Most other components are usable, though they need some work. But I have some great expectations for KOffice 2…
To all the hard working KOffice devs!
waiting for KOffice 2… 🙂