PCWorld.com: Linux Desktop Products Grow

“Reports of Linux’s death on the desktop have been
greatly exaggerated. So says a small group of vendors at LinuxWorld
Expo this week. Surrounded by scores of booths hyping everything
from a “secure server-side Java platform” to “parallel
supercompilers,” we found several offerings proving that the dream
of an open source desktop is nowhere near dead, and that users are
not about to be neglected by the open source community.

KDE League Chair Andreas Pour gave a grand tour of the recently
released KDE 2.2 desktop and its companion office suite, KOffice
1.1. (Most major Linux distributions ship with both packages; these
new versions are free for download from their respective Web
sites.)

KOffice’s use of KDE’s component architecture has matured to the
point where Pour could show a complex chart embedded in a
spreadsheet that was itself embedded in a word processing document.
None of the KOffice applications are as feature-complete as
commercial offerings on either the Linux or Windows platforms, but
they continue to grow in power and depth. The word processor,
KWord, currently lacks support for footnotes, endnotes, and
hyphenation, but makes complex layouts simple.”

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