[HN Gopher] Calligra- FOSS Office Suite by KDE Team
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Calligra- FOSS Office Suite by KDE Team
Author : approxim8ion
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-02-14 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calligra.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (calligra.org)
| [deleted]
| amaccuish wrote:
| I find WPS Office works well, but somehow I have WPS, OnlyOffice
| and LibreOffice all installed, and still sometimes need to resort
| to Office running in Wine.
| RedComet wrote:
| The KDE team does great work.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Does anyone use it as their daily driver office suite? How is it
| holding up?
| MrCoffee7 wrote:
| Calligra has much lower user satisfaction ratings than
| LibreOffice. Does Calligra offer any features compelling enough
| to use it vs. one of the other FOSS office suites?
| https://comparisons.financesonline.com/libreoffice-vs-callig...
| approxim8ion wrote:
| I love that it loads up really fast, compared to LibreOffice
| which is slow as molasses to start up.
|
| LO has way more features though, it's not even a fair
| comparison. And something that ticks me off about Calligra and
| OnlyOffice is that they can't do partial word counts, as in the
| word count of the highlighted portion of the document only.
| Small things like these sting more than more niche features
| that you might not miss.
|
| Still, it's nice looking and fast and adequate for a lot of
| basic documents.
| kwanbix wrote:
| 3 seconds takes LibreOffice Write to load on my "old"
| ThinkPad P50.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| First load or was it already loaded in your session?
|
| Took 21 seconds on my 6 year old laptop with an i3 and 8GB
| of RAM. No SSD though, just a 5400rpm HDD. The second load
| was about 4 seconds though.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Even with a good SSD and processor, LibreOffice takes a lot
| of time for the first fire. Then, as long as it's in the
| memory, you can fire it relatively instantly but, it's not
| "3 seconds flat".
| eptcyka wrote:
| YMMV,for me it starts up instantly.
| bscphil wrote:
| How does "financesonline" measure user satisfaction? I've never
| even heard of it.
| rpdillon wrote:
| One feature that I noticed reading the product page was that it
| works on mobile.
| zamalek wrote:
| The UX looks way ahead of LibreOffice. It's clean and looks
| like it's out of the way. I just can't handle using patchwork
| UIs like LibreOffice (I have basically given up with office
| suites on Linux and use Google Docs) - as it turns out,
| interacting with pleasing things improves the enjoyment of
| using those things.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| I personally prefer it because it is nicer looking, and much
| simpler to use. I don't require much advanced features in word
| or spreadsheet editors, which is why I use Calligra. When I do
| require something more advanced, LibreOffice is my go to office
| suite.
| christophilus wrote:
| 2021 is my personal year of the Linux desktop. I haven't found an
| office suite I particularly like. For documents, I'd love
| something as lightweight and focused as IA Writer. Right now,
| I've settled on VS Code + markdown combined with the markdown PDF
| plugin. It's not bad, actually. And Zen mode gets me most of the
| way to what I liked about IA Writer.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Welcome aboard! Add pandoc to the markdown setup and you gain
| (at least basic) interoperability with other common office
| formats as well.
|
| [1] https://pandoc.org
| bayindirh wrote:
| > For documents, I'd love something as lightweight and focused
| as IA Writer.
|
| I also use IA Writer on my Mac. The best replacement for it on
| Linux Desktop is Ghost Writer [0]. It should be available in
| your favorite package manager already.
|
| It supports Pandoc and can export in a ton of formats.
|
| [0]: https://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/
| christophilus wrote:
| Wow. This looks like just the thing. Thanks!
| atoav wrote:
| Check out typora as well: https://typora.io/
| bayindirh wrote:
| You're welcome. Linux and Mac can cooperate very nicely. I
| use Linux desktops and MacBooks in tandem for years now and
| I'm a happy camper.
|
| Welcome to Linux.
| patrickmd wrote:
| You may want to give FreeOffice a try. While not FOSS, it is
| free as in beer. The application has 27 years of development
| behind it. It is not based on LibreOffice. The application
| boasts full compatibility with all of the Microsoft formats.
|
| https://www.freeoffice.com/
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Why are most KDE applications so visually inconsistent?
|
| Look at the sidebar for their Word equivalent. Inconsistent font
| sizes, lack of margin/padding everywhere, etc.
|
| I've always had this complaint about KDE and I really wish they'd
| fix it, because it drives me nuts.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Because instead of helping, people just complain on the
| internet.
| exikyut wrote:
| What would I do with this?
|
| Not what _can_ I do; what _would_ I do. In the real world.
|
| I'm on my phone at the moment so I went to the Play Store to
| check it out, only to return to the site and realise
| "smartphones" technically means devices running Linux. I'll have
| to check it out properly another time.
|
| Generally speaking, when I look at these kinds of applications, I
| feel like I'm seeing what might be described as a "first-order
| implementation": everything needed to say "we've done it,
| everyone, we built a <blah>". The screenshots do indeed look
| exactly like a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation
| tool, etc. This suite even has a project manager in it, huh.
|
| But beyond the top-level appearance... what about the little
| quality-of-life enhancements that _make_ software like this, the
| tiny things that are individually so minute I can 't even think
| of any of them right now, but which form a disorientating vacuum
| when they're missing? These are the second-order, third-order,
| etc features that turn this type of software from "look I made an
| office suite" into something people from the real world can
| approach and say "...wait, I could _use_ this to do my job,
| because _it implements enough functionality to be intuitive for
| my use cases_. " The software-design equivalent of the difference
| between * _working_ * on the computer and * _working on_ * the
| computer, or having to bend to the software's will instead of
| having it have enough smarts to bend to yours.
|
| I must admit it's hard not to look at this sort of thing without
| disappointed annoyance. I know that years of real effort went
| into this... and for what?
|
| When I look at the project website the impression I get is of
| something defining itself as having mostly arrived. This would
| not be the case if the project's aims (as communicated by the
| design language on the website) did not _only_ extend to a
| literal - or, in other words, first-order - encapsulation
| /interpretation of "reimplement Office", and nothing more. If
| that were the case there would be much more about how unfinished
| everything definitely is and so forth.
|
| Hrm, it definitely looks like I fell out of bed this morning and
| decided I _really_ hate this project in particular for some
| reason. _I don 't_. It's just that, there are certain types of
| steaks out there that are particularly dense, and if you're going
| to try and take a chunk out of them, if you don't do it properly,
| your effort looks like a caricature of itself.
|
| I guess if I were going to try and extract something actionable
| from the above mess, uh... figure out what you are _never_ going
| to do, or at least what you aren 't doing right now, and clearly
| communicate that.
|
| See, it's both about implementation, but it's also about _implied
| specification_ - how you carry yourself, and where you infer you
| 're going. You need to be explicit about that, otherwise when
| people's brains see projects like this, intuit off of the
| inferred direction, autocomplete all of the things that direction
| would imply, and realise that actually the project _doesn 't_
| implement all the things the autocomplete expectation set up,
| that can produce some _really_ annoying cognitive dissonance. I
| must admit I have to make an effort not to interpret it as
| passive-aggressiveness (which I do realise it obviously isn 't).
|
| Anyway, rant over. Like all(?) rants this is _absolutely not_
| aimed specifically at this project, which looks legitimately
| interesting, despite the absence of ground truth about what to
| expect in terms of long-term position. Not from a hard-commitment
| standpoint (which is undeniably hard in open source software),
| but rather just knowing how finished the project thinks it is.
|
| [If you feel this is inappropriate please feel free to downvote
| away.]
| varajelle wrote:
| Calligra is an old project made as part of the KDE desktop. The
| original goal of KDE was to implement all applications used
| typically on a desktop computer to make an unified and user
| friendly desktop experience. An office suite fits into this
| goal.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I find sad they ditched that purpose - be for the lack of
| manpower, complexity or whatever. Calligra home website lists
| Karbon but it right now it is abandoned and almost forgotten,
| while Krita (which was originally part of Koffice/Calligra)
| went its own path and it's shining with is very own light,
| maybe the most successful KDE app right now.
|
| Wonder why they didn't went the same way and did some
| fundraising or something for the whole suite.
| ognarb wrote:
| The problem was that Nokia was funding a lot of the
| development of Calligra with as much as 20 developers.
| Unfortunately development of Calligra dead when Nokia lost
| control of their market. While Krita developers continued
| to develop Calligra for some time, they decided to part
| they way because they just didn't had the workforce to
| maintain krita and Calligra anymore. It's sad for Calligra
| but in the end it is a good thing for Krita.
|
| Development of Calligra didn't died completely but it's not
| the same anymore.
| hnedeotes wrote:
| I haven't heard nor used it but it looks great, will give it a
| try, thanks for sharing
| japhyr wrote:
| I've never heard of this. Can anyone who's used it share how it
| compares to LibreOffice, MS Office, and Google Docs?
| danarmak wrote:
| If you've heard of KOffice, this is a fork from 2010 which
| didn't inherit the project name but eventually became the
| official / only KDE office suite project.
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