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Highlighting KDE on Mac OS X

In KDE 4.0’s cross-platform strategy, Mac OS X plays a key role. The KDE TechBase keeps track of KDE on Mac OS X projects here.

While 4.1 will bring the final release for OS X, there are plenty of things to play with now. I’m particularly interested in KStars, the KDE PIM, and KOffice itself.

I’ve long been a proponent of OpenOffice, but I don’t see KOffice as a threat to OOo. Rather, I think the two are complementary, each with a different primary focus, and yet also helping each other by forming a strong argument for ODF. With ODF, there’s no need to fight for sole software hegemony, since we’ll still be compatible with everyone else regardless of our personal application preferences. As OOo and KOffice grow, they bring more users to the ODF file standard. And as ODF grows, it lets more people freely choose OOo, KOffice, or one of the many other compatible programs.

If a politician were discussing this issue, they’d call it “growing the pie,” not just changing the relative sizes of its slices. That’s good for all the communities involved!

One Response to “Highlighting KDE on Mac OS X”

  1. Peter Sefton Says:
    February 5th, 2008 at 6:40 pm

    I’m interested in the ODF support in the new KOffice, in the current version of KWord the ODT support is not compatible with OpenOffice.org – they will mangle each other’s documents. For example from what I can tell KWord does not seem to use lists at all so list-styles get dumped. Is it better in v2?