Free software office suites smaller than LibreOffice?
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As what our knowledge base has told laypeople LibreOffice is our office suite instead of nonfree MSOffice, but LibreOffice still has a downside to be too bloat. Are there any smaller free software office suites for tight resources machines? Or ones like me which hardware resources are't such tight but still want to be less bloat for a higher capacity to keep trying more free software?
You can try to search "List of office suites" on Wikipedia. But I'm afraid that LibreOffice is by far the best option.
It's very difficult to develop free/libre office suites, because of software patents, proprietary secret formats, etc..
To switch to free/libre office suites, the first step is to stay away from proprietary formats. Please note that Microsoft OOXML is "open" but non-free, because it is heavily patent-encumbered.
In the Wikiepdia descriptions Calligra just imports from MSOffice nonfree formats but doesn't export back to them, so if you don't need to back to nonfree MSOffice Calligra is better than LibreOffice.
The opposed case, if you need full support for nonfree MSOffice formats LibreOffice is your only option,
for spreadsheets and maths calculating you can still choose GNUmeric,
for maths formulating you can still choose LaTeX,
for presentations and publishments you can still choose vectors and PDF programs,
for wording you can still choose AbiWord,
for databases you can still choose database servers like SQlite (which FreeBSD repo are using this).
Otherwise you will unfortunately always be fallen back to LibreOffice.
Calligra components (and their KDE dependencies) are far from "lightweight". Unless you use KDE as your main desktop environment, you'll have to install lots of KDE packages as Calligra's dependencies.
The "compatibility" with Microsoft's non-free formats means nothing for me. Whenever I receive an attachment in non-free format (be it document, archive or anything else), I always formally reply that I demand free/open format and explain in details why non-free formats are bad for me, for him/her and for everyone else (and especially why Microsoft OOXML is not acknowledged as free/open format, although it is approved by ISO and listed in Wikipedia's list of open formats).
I am a translator!
Calligra components (and their KDE dependencies) are far from "lightweight". Unless you use KDE as your main desktop environment, you'll have to install lots of KDE packages as Calligra's dependencies.
When people say software is lightweight they usually refer to load times/how snappy or responsive the application is/memory usage and not to the file size of the package itself, as even the smallest hard drive should suffice for just software package installations (as media files can always be transferred to external hard drives). The reasons not to install KDE apps in a GTK environment are usually not related to packages being lightweight but rather to installing lots of packages which fill up your menus and of course the fact that Qt apps won't look like GTK apps.
See my below pacman logs, if you already have Plasma shell installed you just have very few packages to download. This log is come from Hyperbola which I prefer a more stable environment for dealing with office files. You can also try to install in Trisquel if you are more happy with Plasma, and not GTK which LibreOffice is GTK-based. :)
[lts@lts ~]$ sudo pacman -Su --noconfirm --force --needed calligra
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
Packages (11) cauchy-0.9.0-1 gsl-2.3-1 kcalcore-17.04.0-1 kcontacts-17.04.0-1 kdiagram-2.6.0-1 kproperty-3.0.1-1 kreport-3.0.1-2 kross-5.33.0-1 libodfgen-0.1.6-1 libspnav-0.2.3-1 calligra-3.0.1-2
Total Download Size: 37.15 MiB
Total Installed Size: 131.12 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
:: Retrieving packages...
Here we go for Devuan, when comparing my installtion for Plasma with Calligra other than only Plasma, the sizes difference of packages isn’t more than 128MiB, in other words Calligra just solely costs below 128MiB,
u1zzang@u1zzang:~$ sudo apt dist-upgrade -y --autoremove --purge openbox-kde-session plasma-workspace-wayland calligra xfce4 xfce4-goodies
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
46 upgraded, 568 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 394 MiB/407 MiB of archives.
After this operation, 1,286 MiB of additional disk space will be used.^C
u1zzang@u1zzang:~$ sudo apt dist-upgrade -y --autoremove --purge openbox-kde-session plasma-workspace-wayland xfce4 xfce4-goodies
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
46 upgraded, 360 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 213 MiB/241 MiB of archives.
After this operation, 753 MiB of additional disk space will be used.^C
u1zzang@u1zzang:~$
I am a translator!
>but LibreOffice still has a downside to be too bloat.
that's correct, that's why I use only very few packages compared to the full installation of it, as I use only libreoffice-writer, I need only the damn writer x_X
--no-install-recommends is ur friend :)
However and fortunately, KDE’s Calligra doesn’t look too bloat which you also have Plasma 5 installed. :)
I am a translator!
You can try AbiWord, Calligra (KDE app), Gnumeric or LaTeX software (e.g. Gummi/Texmaker/TeXstudio or LyX which can export to LaTeX as well but uses its own format).
GNU Ed. :)
siag office was one of the smallest. You can still download it, but it hasn't been updated since 2006: http://siag.nu/
In defense of Libo, it's really a great all-in-one tool.
Editing PDFs, some basic graphic design, editing and printing labels... It's very useful in the workplace.
I didn't succed in using vba macros though (it's said they're supported). But I'll try again.
Software bloat is a process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version—whilst making only dubious user-perceptible improvements or suffering from feature creep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bloat
That does not apply to the latest releases of LibreOffice. Do you remember the time LibreOffice used to take to open a document?
LibreOffice is still not so bloated. The installer sizes of LibreOffice are 10~20 times smaller (depending on platform) than Microsoft Office (ISO file from a "pirate" software site). Sometimes even a Microsoft Office update package is bigger than LibreOffice installer. And I believe LibreOffice can be even slimmer if it needn't to deal with non-free formats.
(Is non-free software the main cause of software bloating? Proprietary software vendors are trying their best to add anti-features to their non-free software in order to lock-in users.)
As compared agaginst nonfree MSOffice then LibreOffice is of course not bloated.
However, if you already have Plasma present then fresh install KDE’s Calligra that doesn’t cost above 128MiB.
And, LibreOffice is GTK-written right? But LibreOffice looks to be desktops-independent...
Are you suggesting LibreOffice developers should spend time implementing alternative graphical interfaces (e.g., using Qt) rather than fixing bugs (including performance issues!) and implementing new features?
The problem is that very few people use KDE, especially those using legacy hardware. Light-weight desktop environments like LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, MATE or Cinnamon are much more popular.
When I run the command:
# apt install calligra
I have to download hundreds of packages, mostly KDE and Qt dependencies. If one has enough hardware resources to run the rather heavy-weight KDE, s/he has more than enough to run LibreOffice.
However, to be more objective, I can try to setup a minimalist GNU/Linux distribution installation and see which is more "bloated"...
KDE is not the most bloated DE, GNOME 3 is more bloated although no Qt libs, Deepins messes up Qt and GTK3 libs.
And not my all systems run have KDE installed, on Parabola and Hyperbola I just have the KDE base session installed, relatively small with replacing with QTerminal, Trojita and so on small Qt apps against KDE apps. In short vanilla KDE base session + small Qt apps is not that bloat.
I was a bit busy recently but just did a test in virtual machine. I used the latest Debian (testing) Installer to perform a (not so) minimal installation.
I selected only KDE during installation. When finished, I edited /etc/apt/sources.list and updated the apt cache. Subsequently I run # apt install calligra
I was prompted to download 22 packages with a total size of 36.9 MB. 124 MB of disk space was used after extracting the packages. The Calligra suite included Words, Sheets, Stage and Karbon.
The conclusion is that with all KDE and Qt dependencies present, Calligra suite itself is not very bloated. I want to try it in details. However, I may need first to find an equation editor similar with LibreOffice Math.
I was prompted to download 22 packages with a total size of 36.9 MB. 124 MB of disk space was used after extracting the packages. The Calligra suite included Words, Sheets, Stage and Karbon. The conclusion is that with all KDE and Qt dependencies present, Calligra suite itself is not very bloated.
Is saving tens of MB of disk space really a relevant choice criterion for you? I mean, it probably amounts to about 0.01% of your total disk space (assuming it is hundreds of GB).
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