On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 4:20 PM, Timothy Pearson
<kb9vqf@pearsoncomputing.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 22 June 2011 06:54:36 Tiago Marques wrote:
>
>> > I would have to agree with Ilya Chernykh. While I do understand the
>> > undertaking required to keep it, life has shown me, nothing worth
>> > while, is ever easy. Becoming dependant on outside office suites,
>> > which are now becoming fragmented (project fragmentation is FOSS's
>> > kryptonite) is unwise.
>> >
>> >
>> That is not an issue provided that they are open to integration patches,
>> IMHO.
>
> I still yet have to see at least one integration patch to Open Office by
> the Trinity team.
So far the upstream KDE3 integration has been working just fine with no
changes. And patches will be submitted to LibreOffice as well, when they
are necessary.
Which, though far from perfect, is good enough IMHO, given the state of open source office suites.
I'd love to have the free time to take KOffice and make it an even better suite than LibreOffice - unfortunately I don't have the time, nor does anyone else from what I was able to read from this thread so far. One can also argue that, despite the benefits of high integration, the office suite war is not where a good linux desktop environment wants to be part of. Consider that it is hard enough for non-technical users to become users of LibreOffice, let alone of an "obscure" office suite that, was rather sub-par(again, last time I checked). Same for browsers.
It is rather pointless to be pursuing an independent browser when the ones already available(especially Chrome) integrates well enough with xdg utilities to provide a rather seamless usage experience. The only lacking points, much more easily fixable than maintaing a full, modern web browser, are theming and file dialogs. Consider how pointless it is that most people end up never touching browsers like Epiphany or Konqueror. It has taken Google at least two years to bring Chrome up to speed with Firefox, at least in features and porting to other OSs.
One must face the reality that even after a lot of work is put into a browser, and it's good and all, most people still want to use what they are familiar with, something that for a project as small as Trinity has repercussions on the rest of what still is an excellent desktop environment. Same is applicable to office suites - it is hard enough to get people to send you ODF files.
My personal opinion is that it is better to focus on overall usability - we're not Apple, nor Google, so don't expect relying only on DE + Kernel for your daily needs, even though that would be a wonderful goal for this project if it ever grows that big.
>
>> One always has the chance to fork that suite, integrate the patches
>> and supply ir to whoever wants that.
>
> Oh yes. This team is so huge that in can even fork Open Office.
And this is just plain silly. Of course we are not going to fork OpenOffice!
What was probably meant was that we can supply patches for
OpenOffice/LibreOffice and build binaries ourselves if the main distros
will not build it with TDE support included. That is a very different
concept than a fork.
Precisely, that's what I meant. Thanks Tim.
Best regards,
Tiago
Tim