...why are we making a competitor to libreoffice
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Honestly i'm cool with it. Libreoffice is awesome but is perpetually behind the curve on a lot of things.
My biggest pain points with it currently are:
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No apparent motivation to incorporate Wayland support, resulting in very strangely sized UI elements or dropdown/popup menus that appear very far away from where you clicked
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Pivot tables.
And thats just two examples, there are several others.
If this KDE one brings out the big guns, I am super down for it.
Just realized... why is this not called Kalligra? Boo...
Many more recently named KDE apps don't have a K in them, like Dolphin or Elisa or NeoChat. Naming everything with a K in it was mainly something early KDE did.
Open a ticket.
Calligra has been around for a quite while and it's still not on par with either MS Office or Libreoffice.
Yes, but it's nothing new.
As a KDE fan, I don't use any of these "redundant" programs, unless there is a true benefit.
The thing is that, LibreOffice works and looks great in Plasma, and Calligra doesn't do anything special.
It's even more obvious for me with KTorrent. We already have qBitTorrent!
I absolutely like things like Neochat, tho, because in this case the "official" alternative is an annoying Electron app.
Yeah but I don't think competition is bad.
Maybe they'll make it even better than the alternatives.
Of course, I don't think there is anything inherently wrong about Calligra. It's just that, so far... I see no point for using it.
For me the question becomes whether or not it is a waste of resources.
There's only so many donations to go around.
Calligra is blazingly fast by comparison to open office. I'm glad there's not just one alternative, and I don't think it's a waste of money.
There is also OnlyOffice, which has been more palatable for the people I shared it with (mostly students that were graduating and losing access to free MS Word)
I've found OnlyOffice to have bettet interoperability with MS Office, than LibreOffice. Not perfect, but things like layout are better transferred between the programs. If that is a main concern (i.e. you frequently collaborate with people using MS Office), that would be a good solution. There is however some sketchy licensing stuff going on with OnlyOffice I have yet not fully understood.
It seems Calligra can open, but not save in MS Office file formats. I guess MS Office can open OpenDocument-files, but I believe interoperability will not be too good. Again, if that is a main concern. For me now, it is not.
You can make LibreOffice look more like Microsoft Office, it's in the settings. No need for OnlyOffice for that.
What's the guide on how to split the executables up into separate processes, so when a spreadsheet window crashes, all other windows don't go down as well?
Since you are able to classify it as "redundant", I would assume you have experience using it? Could you comment on some of the main gaps you find between this and LibreOffice, that leads you to prefer LibreOffice? As stated in a comment below, I have no experience with this and would be interested to see if it could be a contender, and it seems you have an opinion that it (at least at present), does not.
If you mean "redundant" as in "LibreOffice already does everything you need", I disagree with that.
I gave it an extended look a few years ago, and I don't remember much of the details, but I found the workflow not terribly intuitive, it had some unusual defaults and was relatively limited in features.
If I remember correctly, it did save in the ODF formats, so for just writing out a letter, it's definitely fine.
There's just not really a reason to use it over LibreOffice, except for it being somewhat more lightweight.
I mean "redundant" as in "Calligra does not offer me anything special compared to LibreOffice"; and so I prefer to keep using LibreOffice as it is essentially the source of all things OpenDocument.
Thanks for good input! I'll give it a spin later, but I will contain my expectations for now. Seems like Krita was spun out of this some time ago, and my impression is that Krita is generally very well liked. Maybe the remaining parts will recieve similar development focus later and they will become true contenders down the line. I like competition, and as said before, I don't think LibreOffice is quite there.
It doesn't handle .docx files.
And it has a useless sidebar you can't remove.
And it doesn't have the libreoffice ecosystem, with lots of extensions and plugins.
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Man, you must have better luck than me because Libreoffice is utter dogshit at sending a print job correctly IME. Several different machines and printers and I can't get a proper print out of LO.
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Calligra can't deal with .docx files at all, and that's enough to disqualify it, really.
I mean, you can save in .docx but you have to manually type in the file ending cause there isn't an option for it.
And it can technically open .docx files, but don't be surprised when it suddenly adds 6 pages to a document that contains nothing but the word "test".
(I couldn't find out if that was caused by the saving or the opening, but it doesn't really matter.)
@SeekPie
kde had this for years.
at first it was koffice then they renamed it
Yes, Calligra has been around forever, and it's been going nowhere in all that time.
I wouldn't place too much hope in it.
Didn't know this, thanks for the info!
This is what I was thinking. This isn't new and it isn't in the best of maintained state. There have been some recent contributions, but not enough to claim that KDE as a whole is doing some huge undertaking such as developing a real alternative to word.
Tried it a few months ago! I'll never complain about alternative software, but it currently has only the basics. Until its further developed, I wouldn't not be comfortable recommending this over LibreOffice to anyone.
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another one?
Interesting, never seen this recommended as an Office alternative. Seems this is nothing new, it was released as KOffice in 2000. Calligra 4.0 was released in August this year though, so it is actively developed. Wonder why it is seldom recommended?
I would like to check this out. Currently in the process of making some presentations outside of work, and using LibreOffice Impress after weighing it up against OnlyOffice Presentation. Both tools leave much to be desired, unfortunately. Both in terms of stability, ease of use and features. For now, Powerpoint does a better job (but also this has some huge annoyances that I think an open source alternative would be better addressing). I am on a deadline, so I do not dare to change up my tools now, so it will be for later.
Wonder why it is seldom recommended?
it's simply not good enough for daily use, unfortunately
Libre Office and Only Office are the only real MS alternatives (which offer decent compatibility) at the moment but I'm excited for KDE expanding its own suite of software, which is something that GNOME has had over it for a long time now.
Expanding? Calligra/KOffice predates LibreOffice/OpenOffice, it just lost on mind share because the Gnome fanatics hate anything KDE more than the messiest OpenOffice spaghetti code.
Oh even better then. I hope it picks up with improved KDE popularity recently!
I hope it picks up with improved KDE popularity recently!
No, sadly it won't. Its time is over. There was a window of opportunity when Calligra's good separation of UI and logic would have made it a good foundation for a web office suite and the desktop version would have benefitted as a side effect. That niche as been taken over by OnlyOffice. I fear its future lies in being a plugin for document viewer Okular.
I forgot that existed. I haven't used it and now I'm wondering how it compares to libreoffice
My abiding memory of it that it handled the basics very well but lacked advanced features. That was a long time ago though so it may have changed.
Certainly looks interesting. Being made by the KDE community, it actually may evolve to something great
I still have to use Word for things because LibreOffice hates tables. Every doc I have to edit explodes violently when ooened in LibreOffice, and fixing the formatting to work in LibO would take far too long for the time available to do it.
I wouldn’t say #LibreOffice hates tables. LibreOffice does good work with tables.
I WOULD say that MS Word and LibreOffice **disagree vehemently** about tables.
Interesting
Not quite Libreoffice but looks cool
Cool, and this is a good thing. I like it.
That said, after loading KDE on a system this weekend I was reminded of how much like Windows KDE is (on purpose, of course) and how I don't like it.
It's brilliant for someone moving to linux from Windows who "likes Windows" and it's beautiful and fast and free. Just not my preference.
For me KDE is "Windows UI done right". The layout I prefer, done better than by a trillion dollar corporation. Ergonomic. Beautiful. Just right.
At the same time, Cinnamon, originating from GNOME in an attempt to make it more "Windows-like", is my personal horror, like a collection of all things Windows has done wrong and then some more. Bulky. Rigid. Poor and complicated personalization. But that's truly the beauty of it - for some, Cinnamon is superb.
As per non-Windows style layouts, I tried to force myself to get to know and love them, but they really don't click with me. Windows has done it the way I like, and KDE does it in a way that I don't want to go back to genuine Windows UI, either.
Perfect - yes, that's exactly how it should be. I put plasma neon on an old laptop and went back to wipe it with a new distro but it worked so well I just left it.
But you can change it almost totally, to behave and look more mac os or anything else.
True, it's just my current distro-of-choice does that out of the box so I just pick the color scheme and I'm off to the races.
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