The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential — but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE’s KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among KOffice developers. The project team recently announced the second stable release. Aside from its package availability only in the Ubuntu repository, Calligra has limited access through cumbersome archived files. So installing it in distros other than Ubuntu Linux requires a series of steps involving uncompressing and compiling.
I'm using Calligra 2.52 and a I haven't noticed a lot of the problems mentioned in the article. I agree that Calligra needs development to make it a competitive product. Still, the feature set is unique in an office suite. It is like having MS Office with Project, Visio and One Note in a single interconnected suite.
When fully functional it will be a major cost savings compared to the Microsoft Office Suite since 80% of the users don't need all the functionality of MS. Small and Medium business and individual contractors will have a tool that, in these times, will be a valuable lifesaver. I just hope Calligra gets the resources to realize the vision.
Lo and behold, now we know was wrong the KDE developers, mysterious and slow, this is a not ready yet, for any use, except to be sent back to the drawing board.
Agreed, Ubuntu's Calligra packages are for 2.4 in version 12.04, unless one adds an extra package source. 2.5.2 is much improved over 2,4. I also imagine the menu hover issue may be a Unity thing with its universal menu bar, as I don't see this Kubuntu's KDE. Dragging text works fine as well, and I don't recall any typing lag either.
So, yes, very sloppy review. However some of Calligra's shortcomings may still hold true, depending on one's needs. Lack of export features is probably the big one for a large number of people.
Before I continue to issues with Calligra itself, your claim that Calligra is only available as a package in Ubuntu is false. It is also available in Fedora, Opensuse, Debian, Arch and more, which covers a pretty sizable percentage of Linux users. I suspect few people would have to go to the trouble of compiling it just to try out Calligra.
A lot of your problems have a more to do with (I suspect) Ubuntu picking crazy defaults for Calligra and/or KDE. Also their packaging must be pretty awful if you are actually having all of those problems. What version of Calligra are you using? The current release is version 2.5.2
I haven't had any problems with responsiveness - letters appear and/or the cursor moves as soon as I press a key. No delay at all. Not sure why this would happen to you, and it's possible this is a bug in Calligra but more likely it is a bug in Ubuntu's packages. Even if you're using an older 2.4 package, this never happened to me in either Arch or Opensuse with either the current or older versions.
In fact on my three year old mid range laptop, Calligra Words is by far the best performing word processor I have used. Not just text input but it is very fast starting up and opening or saving files. So I don't understand your comment at the end about performance.
Spell check is fine for me. No false positives, no extra letters at the end.
"Calligra apparently does not support click and drag actions."
Yes it does. You can drag highlighted text wherever you want.
"When you first run Calligra, the only tool bar across the top of the writing screen is for New/Open/Save"
Pretty sure that isn't the default setting, it certainly wasn't in either distribution I use. When I first opened it it also had Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste and Find. Just like the first screenshot at http://www.calligra.org/words/
"Everything else is hidden from view until you move the mouse pointer to the top border to expose the full drop-down menu."
This is not a Calligra or KDE default either. See the aforementioned screenshot for how it usually looks. File, Edit, View etc menus are there.
"Calligra has a bit of a learning curve. After several days of orienting myself to Calligra's interface, I still was not comfortable with it and still can not find several must-use features. For instance, I started writing this week's column in Calligra Words. In doing so, I had to follow a word length requirement. That was a problem because I still haven't located that item on a menu."
Fair enough, Calligra has a slightly different interface. And as you noted, the help/handbook isn't that great. But as with most KDE related projects, Calligra has a forum that is very helpful. I haven't searched, maybe the answer is already there somewhere. Anyway the word count feature is located in the statistics docker. It seems that it is not enabled by default but you can show it through the menu by clicking Settings > Dockers > Statistics. Alternatively you can right click on the header of any docker that is already shown to reveal a list of available dockers.
And as for the New file/startup screen, I fail to see how anyone could be confused by that. Sure, it's a bit different to most applications but it's pretty straightforward...
In case you're wondering, I have no affiliation to Calligra, I am just a user. I also use Libreoffice because Calligra isn't perfect. You are right that there are a couple of features it lacks, most importantly saving to Microsoft formats. But this review has more problems with it than Calligra.
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Calligra Productivity Suite: Too Much Trouble
Posted by: Jack M. Germain October 3, 2012 05:00 AMThe Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential — but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE’s KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among KOffice developers. The project team recently announced the second stable release. Aside from its package availability only in the Ubuntu repository, Calligra has limited access through cumbersome archived files. So installing it in distros other than Ubuntu Linux requires a series of steps involving uncompressing and compiling.
When fully functional it will be a major cost savings compared to the Microsoft Office Suite since 80% of the users don't need all the functionality of MS. Small and Medium business and individual contractors will have a tool that, in these times, will be a valuable lifesaver. I just hope Calligra gets the resources to realize the vision.
So, yes, very sloppy review. However some of Calligra's shortcomings may still hold true, depending on one's needs. Lack of export features is probably the big one for a large number of people.
Before I continue to issues with Calligra itself, your claim that Calligra is only available as a package in Ubuntu is false. It is also available in Fedora, Opensuse, Debian, Arch and more, which covers a pretty sizable percentage of Linux users. I suspect few people would have to go to the trouble of compiling it just to try out Calligra.
A lot of your problems have a more to do with (I suspect) Ubuntu picking crazy defaults for Calligra and/or KDE. Also their packaging must be pretty awful if you are actually having all of those problems. What version of Calligra are you using? The current release is version 2.5.2
I haven't had any problems with responsiveness - letters appear and/or the cursor moves as soon as I press a key. No delay at all. Not sure why this would happen to you, and it's possible this is a bug in Calligra but more likely it is a bug in Ubuntu's packages. Even if you're using an older 2.4 package, this never happened to me in either Arch or Opensuse with either the current or older versions.
In fact on my three year old mid range laptop, Calligra Words is by far the best performing word processor I have used. Not just text input but it is very fast starting up and opening or saving files. So I don't understand your comment at the end about performance.
Spell check is fine for me. No false positives, no extra letters at the end.
"Calligra apparently does not support click and drag actions."
Yes it does. You can drag highlighted text wherever you want.
"When you first run Calligra, the only tool bar across the top of the writing screen is for New/Open/Save"
Pretty sure that isn't the default setting, it certainly wasn't in either distribution I use. When I first opened it it also had Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste and Find. Just like the first screenshot at http://www.calligra.org/words/
"Everything else is hidden from view until you move the mouse pointer to the top border to expose the full drop-down menu."
This is not a Calligra or KDE default either. See the aforementioned screenshot for how it usually looks. File, Edit, View etc menus are there.
"Calligra has a bit of a learning curve. After several days of orienting myself to Calligra's interface, I still was not comfortable with it and still can not find several must-use features. For instance, I started writing this week's column in Calligra Words. In doing so, I had to follow a word length requirement. That was a problem because I still haven't located that item on a menu."
Fair enough, Calligra has a slightly different interface. And as you noted, the help/handbook isn't that great. But as with most KDE related projects, Calligra has a forum that is very helpful. I haven't searched, maybe the answer is already there somewhere. Anyway the word count feature is located in the statistics docker. It seems that it is not enabled by default but you can show it through the menu by clicking Settings > Dockers > Statistics. Alternatively you can right click on the header of any docker that is already shown to reveal a list of available dockers.
And as for the New file/startup screen, I fail to see how anyone could be confused by that. Sure, it's a bit different to most applications but it's pretty straightforward...
In case you're wondering, I have no affiliation to Calligra, I am just a user. I also use Libreoffice because Calligra isn't perfect. You are right that there are a couple of features it lacks, most importantly saving to Microsoft formats. But this review has more problems with it than Calligra.