A few days ago one of my colleagues announced to them the release of a new version of the KDE office suite. I installed Calligra and I wonder why. I believe in the principles of free software and in people doing whatever they want, but there are projects that have no reason to exist when there are many more advanced ones and those efforts could be dedicated to something more necessary.
Jose Albert raised a series of questions to determine whether the existence of an open project is justified or not. I will let each of you answer the question of which category Calligra falls into. What I am saying is that in my opinion there is no justification for its continuation.
The end of the principles of free software
For readers who are just starting out in the Linux world, I remind you that the 4 principles of free software are:
Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose
Freedom 1: Freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, access to the source code is necessary for this freedom.
Freedom 2: To be able to copy and distribute copies.
Freedom 3: The freedom to modify and improve the program by making the improvements public to others. This is the way a community is nourished.
When Richard M Stallman created the free software movement that grew out of those freedoms, he did so with the idea of giving developers the ability to solve problems they found in the tools they used. As things turned out, Linux distributions ended up with a lot of projects based more on developer ego than user need. Linux is full of video players and Markdown notepads, but we don't have character recognition software or a professional-quality photo editor.
KDE was the first desktop for Linux and grew despite opposition from a hard core group that told its creator that if he wanted a graphical interface he should buy a Mac. Over the years it developed its own ecosystem of applications, many of which are very good. This one is not the case here.
I installed Calligra and I'm wondering why
Calligra is ain the office suite developed by the KDE project. It would have been nice 15 years ago when Linux users had to make do with the slightly improved version of OpenOffice (courtesy of Novell) that came with Linux distributions. But a year later came LibreOffice and now we have OnlyOffice, not to mention proprietary alternatives like FreeOffice and Softmaker Office. There are also Google Docs and 365 (Office online).
Calligra is composed of:
- Words: The name says it all. It's a word processor with desktop publishing capabilities. The official flatpak version doesn't have spell check support for languages other than English. Kind of like Ford not including tires on vehicles it makes outside of Detroit.
- Traineeship: A presentation program that can be compatible with PowerPoint as long as PowerPoint is compatible with LibreOffice's ODF format. For that, isn't it better to use LibreOffice, which can export and read PowerPoint's native format?
- :Sheets The spreadsheet that does what a spreadsheet does, but with fewer options than its competitors.
- Carbon: A tool for working with vector images. My only complaint is that it overlaps with Krita, another KDE project, and that Inkscape is much more advanced in terms of features.
- Kexi: A database creator. I never got around to using it so I won't say anything about it.
- Plan: Here I have to say that I think it's great to add a project planner to an office suite and that it's an idea that the Libre Office developers should copy.
To be clearI'm not disparaging the project or the efforts. I'm saying that they would be better directed towards improving LibreOffice's integration with KDE or creating other applications that Linux users need.
But, don't take my opinion for granted. You can try it out by installing it on Flatpak format