Calligra- FOSS Office Suite by KDE Team
What would I do with this?<p>Not what <i>can</i> I do; what <i>would</i> I do. In the real world.<p>I&#x27;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 &quot;smartphones&quot; technically means devices running Linux. I&#x27;ll have to check it out properly another time.<p>Generally speaking, when I look at these kinds of applications, I feel like I&#x27;m seeing what might be described as a &quot;first-order implementation&quot;: everything needed to say &quot;we&#x27;ve done it, everyone, we built a &lt;blah&gt;&quot;. 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.<p>But beyond the top-level appearance... what about the little quality-of-life enhancements that <i>make</i> software like this, the tiny things that are individually so minute I can&#x27;t even think of any of them right now, but which form a disorientating vacuum when they&#x27;re missing? These are the second-order, third-order, etc features that turn this type of software from &quot;look I made an office suite&quot; into something people from the real world can approach and say &quot;...wait, I could <i>use</i> this to do my job, because <i>it implements enough functionality to be intuitive for my use cases</i>.&quot; The software-design equivalent of the difference between *<i>working</i>* on the computer and *<i>working on</i>* the computer, or having to bend to the software&#x27;s will instead of having it have enough smarts to bend to yours.<p>I must admit it&#x27;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?<p>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&#x27;s aims (as communicated by the design language on the website) did not <i>only</i> extend to a literal - or, in other words, first-order - encapsulation&#x2F;interpretation of &quot;reimplement Office&quot;, and nothing more. If that were the case there would be much more about how unfinished everything definitely is and so forth.<p>Hrm, it definitely looks like I fell out of bed this morning and decided I <i>really</i> hate this project in particular for some reason. <i>I don&#x27;t</i>. It&#x27;s just that, there are certain types of steaks out there that are particularly dense, and if you&#x27;re going to try and take a chunk out of them, if you don&#x27;t do it properly, your effort looks like a caricature of itself.<p>I guess if I were going to try and extract something actionable from the above mess, uh... figure out what you are <i>never</i> going to do, or at least what you aren&#x27;t doing right now, and clearly communicate that.<p>See, it&#x27;s both about implementation, but it&#x27;s also about <i>implied specification</i> - how you carry yourself, and where you infer you&#x27;re going. You need to be explicit about that, otherwise when people&#x27;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 <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> implement all the things the autocomplete expectation set up, that can produce some <i>really</i> 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&#x27;t).<p>Anyway, rant over. Like all(?) rants this is <i>absolutely not</i> 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.<p>[If you feel this is inappropriate please feel free to downvote away.]