Penthouse Suite

Open most office suites of the past 20 years, and you know what to expect: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, and possibly a database, a basic graphics program, and a scattering of other, often undeveloped tools. However, Calligra Suite [1], currently in second beta for its 2.9 release, is trying to shake up those expectations with a selection of applications designed for the modern user.

Office suites were not always so predictable. In the early 1990s, office suites were a hot topic in programming. StarDivision, the proprietary ancestor of LibreOffice, came with email and web browsers, as well as a desktop environment. But all these extras were jettisoned when Sun bought StarDivision in 1999, leaving only the standard set of applications.

This standard set consisted of programs that had been on the cutting edge in the early days of the personal computer. However, a generally available Linux office suite did not exist. Consequently, when Calligra's ancestor KOffice began development in 1997, "it was natural to base all productivity software on the same technical core," according to Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer of the Krita paint program. The only reason, he adds, that early releases contained kontour, an early vector graphics application, was because "that was what someone liked to work on."

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