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.
> 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.
Much like nuclear fusion, the year of the Linux desktop is just on the horizon.
Jokes aside, desktop apps on Linux are more common than ever, thanks to Electron. We all bemoan the continued gobbling of good, sensible software by the bloated web, but I'm forced to admit that it's actually kind of nice to have some level of support for commercial desktop applications, even if it's not quite first-class.
By contrast, the state of the Linux desktop is a little less sunny. No matter what your opinion on Wayland actually is, you certainly have to admit that the transition is not going very well.
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.
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.
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".
Yeah, I have it on an SSD and it took six seconds to load. (And I have run it before since the last reboot, but it was closed and probably purged from memory since then.)
Kinda reminds me, back in the day Microsoft would add a startup service that would preload Internet Explorer and Word (I think those two) into memory, because they started so slowly by default. Trying to get a leg up on the competition, I suppose, since obviously Firefox or what have you wasn't pulling similar tricks. I'd disable stuff like that in msconfig to get a faster boot time, but was always shocked by how slow Word would load after that.
Seems like they scrape social media, they say "We use our behavior-based Customer Satisfaction Algorithm™ to gather customer reviews, comments and opinions across a wide range of social media sites to help you make an informed buying decision."
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.
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.
This is something that always really stood out for me yet I hadn't seen any discussion about it. Is this something that most Linux users not notice? It was a reason I'd preferred GNOME over KDE and had always hoped it would improve at some point.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
