[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: KOffice potential, a call for developers
From:       Raphael Langerhorst <raphael-langerhorst () gmx ! at>
Date:       2005-01-08 17:04:25
Message-ID: 200501081804.25815.raphael-langerhorst () gmx ! at
[Download RAW message or body]

>
> On a different note; your post does not give me any reason to
> believe you on the potential KOffice has, and what I could add to
> it.  But writing something is better then nothing, I guess.

Maybe some personal description here (it's difficult to write that in 
an article):

I have three machines, all installed with KDE. One 1 GHz Athlon 
Desktop PC, one 1 GHz PIII mobile laptop, one 500 MHz K6-2. I have 
KOffice installed on all three, I have OpenOffice.org only on my 1 
GHz Athlon (in addition to KOffice). I guess I had OOo installed on 
my K6-2 earlier as well but loading times... uhm, well, were quite 
long. Instead, KOffice loads almost instantly (on a 500 MHz 
machine!!). KOffice looks better, is better integrated in KDE, 
supports äüßö and all that stuff for my file names (OOo doesn't) and 
lets me do all my work (in fact I DO all my work with KOffice and use 
OOo only for conversions to the legacy stuff). Oh, and KOffice 
supports kprinter out of the box, as well as KIO, DCOP,.... all those 
nice features are simply not available in OOo - besides the fact that 
KOffice has also much more components(!!) Of course OOo is a nice 
piece of software, but I would ONLY use it if there is no KDE 
available. OOo performs worse on almost all aspects in a KDE desktop, 
EXCEPT that it is more stable/less bugs (and MS Office compatibility, 
which is not a criteria for me). It would be very bad if OOo wouldn't 
be that stable considering its age, and I would like KOffice to 
become that stable (or even better) as well.

... ok, just tested startup time (after a fresh boot) of OOo Writer 
1.1.3 on FreeBSD 5.3 on my Athlon 1 GHz machine: 20 seconds. KWord: 3 
seconds. 5 seconds on K6-2. Of course startup time is not everything. 
Installing OOo with all capabilities requires Java, ORBIT, gtk, glib 
(and compiling: pkgconfig, apache-ant, glib, pango, rpm, 
Mozilla(?), ...). All these need to be installed additionally to KDE. 
(note: I don't dislike Gnome in any way, but if I don't use it it's a 
bit of memory and management waste to have those additional libs 
around - and compiling all this from the FreeBSD ports yourself takes 
as long as compiling the complete KDE, including KOffice).

And please don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that OOo exists and 
don't even want KOffice to beat out OOo in any way. It's just that I 
believe that KDE as a platform has the huge advantage of bringing a 
much richer office experience to the end-user than OOo will be able 
to - and still be compatible (soon, at least). And of course OOo is a 
good alternative for those that are deadlocked in a proprietary 
environment - and they will then be also able to open KOffice files 
without any problem.

KOffice has become quite dear to me, it provides my whole family with 
office capabilities and probably hundreds of other KDE users that 
don't use OOo. The only thing it needs is more stability and glitches 
removal, additionally to improving features (although it already 
provides almost everything you need under _normal_ circumstances).

The content of paragraph 1 shows already that KOffice has huge 
capabilities and potential, without the need to implement all this in 
the KOffice sourcecode itself(!), with _ALL_ consequences on 
performance, managability, integration, etc.. This is an advantage no 
other office suite will ever have on KDE.

-- 
Raphael Langerhorst, JID: raphael@jabber.pilgerer.de
G System, The Evolving Universe - http://www.g-system.at
_______________________________________________
koffice-devel mailing list
koffice-devel@kde.org
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice-devel

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]