Hmm, there used to be arrows behind the old and new names for the applications.
KWord -> Words
KPresenter -> Stage
KPlato -> Plan

No, this is not correct although I understand why you might get that impression.

Here is the short story on the Calligra Suite:

Calligra was indeed spun off from KOffice about a year ago. Some call it a fork but it was actually more of a split. Some applications moved to Calligra (KPlatoPlan, Kexi, Brainstorm, KPresenterStage), some others were indeed forked ( KWordWords). Many of them got new names as did the whole suite (which you can see in the previous sentence).

KOffice was a nice enough office suite for users with simple needs, but the Calligra team has bigger plans. One of the big strengths oof Calligra is that it's both very modular and the UI is well separated from what we call the Office Engine which handles loading, storing, saving, and rendering of documents but not editing. This is the result of the work from the last 2 years, much of it sponsored by Nokia. During the same time the engine itself has also been much improved with a completely new text layout engine, automatic tests to ensure that we don't get any regressions, many new features and improved stability. There is a company called KO GmbH that does commercial work on Calligra, and they have had most of their business around the engine and the import filters for Microsoft formats.

So during this last year much much energy has been put into the office engine which benefits all platforms / UI's and a number of new UI's have been developed: Nokia Harmattan Office for the N9, Calligra Mobile for the nokia n900 (this one is actually a bit older), Calligra Active for the Plasma Active environment which just got announced will be used in the Spark tablet.

What has indeed been lagging behind was the desktop UI which would give you the impression that you got. But the last few months we have also seen a lot of work here. The style manager has been improved, the text formatting dialogs (actually dockers in the case of Calligra desktop) are much nicer now and new features like footnotes/endnotes and many others have been developed and integrated. Note that these features were already present in the engine so it was a relatively minor effort to implement them in the UI. Also other applications than the word processor have gotten a number of new features but Calligra is so modular that it's sometimes difficult to say which application benefits the most from a new feature. If it's available in one application it's also available in the others provided that the feature makes sense in them.

Now we are getting closer to the first release. We hope it will be at the beginning of March, and we have great hopes that people will like what we have done.

If you want to embed or reuse a library then I would suggest that you would be better off by using the Office Engine from the Calligra Suite (http//www.calligra.org/). It is already used in many mobile and embedded places, e.g. the office viewer in the Nokia N9 smartphone. The engine -- and the apps themselves -- are all under LGPL which makes it usable even with non-free apps.

Ah, but it isn't. If you just confine yourself to the US, you may think so. But if you look around globally, you will find that KDE is actually used more. For instance, see the 24 Million(!) school kids in Brazil using the KDE desktop.

* KDE was rebranded a year ago. It's now the name of the community, not the desktop.
* KDE, the community, is stronger than ever with more contributors than ever and more commits than ever.
* Calligra does not switch focus to mobile, but it *extends* the focus to mobile... and tablets... and so on.

Let me assure you that Aaron is *not* generally thought of as being selfish and elitist. He is a very smart guy who sees the big picture in things and who also listens to other people a lot before he makes up his mind. He also has a good way with words, which may not go well down with people who have other agendas. Those of us who often interact and work with Aaron sees what an immense load of bullshit he has to put up with from anonymous cowards. We know he is a pleasant guy, and we not only like him, but also pity him sometimes for the flack he has to endure. Like the parent.

This makes no sense. An office suite like OpenOffice.org can't be replaced with an online service. They should put some effort into KOffice instead and then use that. That's what Nokia is doing for their N900 Linux phone and it's the best choice for this situation. I know that many are going to say now that KOffice will bring in many megs of dependencies, but that's not strictly true. There are ways to cut out what you need from Qt and kdelibs, and that is what the developers did on the N900.

> Whew. The snarky comments about KDE are pretty crazy.

First they ignore you
Then they ridicule you
Then they fight you
They you win.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which step we are at now. :-)

The KOffice developers don't package KOffice binaries. That's done by either the distros in the Linux case or the KDE-on-Windows team for Windows. I'm sure they will package KOffice 2.0.0 soon.

Then, on the other hand, it may take some time because the KDE windows installer is not 100% ready yet. We'll see.