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Caligra Workbench

caligra.com

36 pointsphanimahesh19 comments

There are a couple interesting-sounding claims made here but there is basically no detail to be found, which strikes me as odd at best and suspicious at worst.

Yeah it's a bit odd. I can get a sense of what they might be doing and perhaps it's a compelling product but no where near enough info to go on, let alone reserve one for $99 and later buy at $1999.

Man, thats a confusing setup for what this is, of which "Workbench" is a reduced desktop environment on some (custom?) linux distribution. All of which runs on the Caligra "developer terminal" (viewable on the home page https://caligra.com/ ) which, from the single top-down photo they provide, looks like a slightly more modern Commodore 64.

looks like an AI design to me. no way the escape key needs to be that big.

On that page they have Cmd + Esc mapped as the shortcut for the global system menu (see “Teleport”), and it looks like the CEO is a NeoVim user[0].

I guess they anticipate users hitting escape a lot. Making it a large target doesn’t strike me as a worse use of the space than dividing function keys into blocks of 4, and more likely to be intentional than an artefact of generative AI.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7353029...

ctrl-[ wants a word

that's like saying this is a sensible thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqfkuc5mawg&t=322s

Seems to be unrelated with Calligra Suite https://calligra.org/

They should change their name in order to not confuse anyone since it's targeted at existing Linux users

I wonder if anybody in the wirld is actually using Calligra Suite

I do when I need to look at WP and spreadsheets people send to me. It comes with Slackware.

It is fine for my purposes.

Why not Libreoffice, surely it must be available too?

I used to be a Slackware user back in the day, good times!

No reason, slackware already has a suite, so I just use what is already there.

I do, wirldly enough

You got me. Writing thumb touch on the phone with a another language set (I use 5 different lqnguages on the phone) is proned for mistakes :)

Apparently too many Apple influences on what is supposed to be a Linux distribution.

I got a chuckle out of that, since this also shares a name with the Amiga GUI

The OS sounds like bluefin-dx, but I'm struggling to figure out who they're marketing to here. Seems like a small market that System76 already owns.

I was confused by the command symbols, since most Linux distros use the ctrl/alt/super terms. But they have some hardware too with integrated keyboard (do any other desktop computers do that anymore?). The custom keyboard layout is both interesting and kinda awful (biggest escape key I've ever seen).

It looks like they're trying to be "linux for apple ex-pats".

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