KOffice 2.0 is here, sort of

Posted at 11:03am on Friday May 29th 2009

KOffice 2.0

It's been a long time coming, but KOffice 2.0 has finally arrived. But before you rush off to grab the brand-spanking-new KDE office suite, heed these words from the developers: "This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet." It looks like the KOffice team have learned some lessons from the KDE 4.0 release - don't make a big deal of a major version number bump if there's still a lot of functionality to be implemented. Changelog summary after the break.

'Flake' shapes - simple pictures or complete embeddable charts that can be used in any KOffice app
GUI better suited to widescreen displays, with more tear-off toolboxes
Platform independence: runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, with Solaris to follow
ODF is the standard file format
Database creator Kexi should be in KOffice 2.1
Flowchart editor Kivio is without a maintainer and in development limbo

You should follow us on Identi.ca or Twitter

Your comments

Huh

Muzer (not verified) - May 29, 2009 @ 11:17am

So what version is koffice-kde4 in Kubuntu then? Aptitude says 1:2.0.0-0ubuntu1~jaunty1 (it was just updated today). Sounds like Canonical might be yet again ignoring warnings and going with cutting-edge... it certainly has loads of tear-off toolboxes and has ODF as the only format it will save into (obviously they've forgotten that there's people with only Word '03 installed...).

Most people run Open Office

dismayed (not verified) - May 29, 2009 @ 3:52pm

Most people run Open Office so they can open files that MS Office can't. This decision sounds like it was made by MS. No backwards compatibility.

this are backported packages

drvoodoo (not verified) - May 30, 2009 @ 12:09pm

@Muzer

you have the backport reposirory activated. And in the backport repository are unsupported updates. so it's not so mistaken as you mean.

what else should we package then?

eMBee (not verified) - May 31, 2009 @ 1:22pm

if koffice for kde 4 is not ready for use yet then what available for use instead? the old kde 3.5? no longer supported and already replaced by kde 4 in most distributions. it looks like the choices are between koffice 2.0 or no koffice at all...

greetings, eMBee.

>if koffice for kde 4 is not

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - June 1, 2009 @ 1:08am

>if koffice for kde 4 is not ready for use yet then what available for use instead?

KOffice 2 is perfectly able to be used. It went through seven (7) beta versions and a release candidate version (rc).

The text in the release announcement is just a warning, along the lines: "THIS IS A .0 VERSION! NOT ALL FUNCTIONS ARE IMPLEMENTED YET".

This is standard practice for a major re-write. KDE 4.0 release notes just assumed that people knew this fact, and they left out that warning, and there was an endless beat-up about it.

So the KOffice team have simply remembered to include it.

What functionality is present in KOffice 2.0 will work just fine (as it should after 7 betas and an rc version). Use it if you like, but just don't expect every single thing to be working yet.

I was hoping that KOffice

Anonymous Penguin (not verified) - June 2, 2009 @ 4:22pm

I was hoping that KOffice 2.0 would breathe some life into KOffice and make it more viable as an open office alternative. I always disliked KOffice 1.6, but sometimes you can't but help think OpenOffice is a bit bloated and slow. wasn't KOffice 2.0 supposed to be out with KDevelop 4.0 around the time of KDE 4.2 as well.

KDE 4.0 and KOffice 2.0 its up to distros and not KDE

BaldFat (not verified) - June 6, 2009 @ 8:32pm

KDE 4.0 was released and there were warnings and they didn't want the desktop to be default. To be arbitrary numbers mean so much. I think that everyone wants X.0 to be the stable release, but we all know never to trust a X.0. So why keep beating up KDE 4.0????

There are two points

mjjzf - June 10, 2009 @ 6:55am

I believe it to be stable enough. New features like music notation in a word processor makes it interesting enough to try.
However, the interface is horrible! Maybe it is just an attempt to be innovative (I guess that is the KDE approach, break and build) and to make use of that strangely accepted widescreen format. But it really isn't pretty.