Calligra- FOSS Office Suite by KDE Team

Look at the sidebar for their Word equivalent. Inconsistent font sizes, lack of margin/padding everywhere, etc.

I've always had this complaint about KDE and I really wish they'd fix it, because it drives me nuts.

For everything else, and importing odt files, wordgrinder.

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.]