KDE's Calligra KOffice Fork Sees Its First Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE's Calligra KOffice Fork Sees Its First Release

Back in 2010 there was the fork of KDE's KOffice to form what would be called the Calligra Suite, following unresolved disputes among KOffice developers. After being in development for quite some time, the Calligra developers have today made their first release: Calligra 2.4...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA4NjI

[halfmanhalfamazing]

This is just an initial reaction, but perhaps the KDE community should consider making Calligra the standard.

Koffice is horrible. I've had it crash on me simply typing up a report, without changing fonts, font sizes, nothing. Just open application and start typing.

At first glance, Calligra seems better maintained. According to: http://www.koffice.org/kivio/ Kivio needs a maintainer.

To all the flamers: I'm not saying that Kivio is better than or worse than Flow. What I am saying is what's easily observable. An unmaintained program(or package within a suite) doesn't have a future, and does threaten the suite as a whole.

[smitty3268]

This is just an initial reaction, but perhaps the KDE community should consider making Calligra the standard.

I'm pretty sure it is. There were only a few (1?) KOffice developers who didn't move to the new Calligra project. It's more of a rebranding + opportunity to refocus rather than a true "fork".

[staalmannen]

This is awesome news. I would love to move from Libreoffice to calligra, only one thing makes it difficult and that is the lack of reference managers.

In a collaborative environment using LaTex-based documents and the reference managers associated to that is unfortunately not an option since most people are using MS office and Endnote. LO + Zotero (stand-alone version) works pretty fine in such a mixed environment, but I would love to move over to Calligra.

[Teho]

I'There were only a few (1?) KOffice developers who didn't move to the new Calligra project.

KOffice has had only two contributors in the past year and neither of those are active... or so it seems. According to Ohloh Calligra has had 87 developers in the past twelve months for comparison. Not only that Calligra has completely rewritten text layout engine which obviously affects the Words the most which was the app that KOffice was going to work on. So I think we can say KOffice is completely deprecated even if it sometimes happens to have few commits.

[89c51]

KOffice has had only two contributors in the past year and neither of those are active... or so it seems. According to Ohloh Calligra has had 87 developers in the past twelve months for comparison. Not only that Calligra has completely rewritten text layout engine which obviously affects the Words the most which was the app that KOffice was going to work on. So I think we can say KOffice is completely deprecated even if it sometimes happens to have few commits.

imagine if all those 87 devs were putting an effort in trying to make Libre integrate better with KDE

[Tsiolkovsky]

Great to hear about the new release. I'm getting increasingly annoyed by LibreOffice, it's just way to bloated and it has bad integration with the desktop. I tried KOffice about a year ago and I liked how fast and light it was. But it still had some problems loading ODF documents and KWord didn't support tables back then. But I liked KPlato project management tool a lot and this one I'm still using today. Anyways I definitely have to try Calligra and see how it works for me now and if all is OK I will definitely switch. I love the way that interface is layed out in Calligra a lot.

[crispy]

Hope they will make it as feature complete as libreoffice, which also in my opinion is starting to seem quite heavy. Ive actually started to use gnumeric instead of calc because of that.

[Imouto]

This is just an initial reaction, but perhaps the KDE community should consider making Calligra the standard.

Koffice is horrible. I've had it crash on me simply typing up a report, without changing fonts, font sizes, nothing. Just open application and start typing.

At first glance, Calligra seems better maintained. According to: http://www.koffice.org/kivio/ Kivio needs a maintainer.

To all the flamers: I'm not saying that Kivio is better than or worse than Flow. What I am saying is what's easily observable. An unmaintained program(or package within a suite) doesn't have a future, and does threaten the suite as a whole.

I agree. We should propose that they merge their project. Fork is good, but merge is better for free software.I would love to see forks merge like Linux and Android just did. It is a win-win.

[TheBlackCat]

This is just an initial reaction, but perhaps the KDE community should consider making Calligra the standard.

The article isn't very well-worded, since it wasn't really a "fork". Officially it was a "split", but when the split has one or two developers on one side and everyone else on the other, I would say it would make the side with one or two developers the fork (that would be KOffice). So the closest thing we have to the "official" KOffice is actually Calligra, but the two developers insisted on keeping the KOffice name for themselves and the Calligra developers, although initially opposed (I think in a large part to avoid this sort of confusion) eventually relented.

As for the KDE community making Calligra official, there isn't really any mechanism to make applications "official" that are not released with standard KDE SC releases (like amarok, kdenlive, k3b, calligra, etc), but in terms of developer support and user-base one application generally comes out ahead in the end and becomes the de-facto standard.