Most of the big tech news sites have written about the release and what I personally think is nice is that every time some non-tech journal write about OpenDocument, they mention OpenOffice.org and KOffice in the same sentence.
User reactions are also very favorable. Many people say that they prefer KOffice and some say that they are forced to use other suites because of some missing features in KOffice, but they would use it if they could. They like the speed and responsiveness of it and the advanced features of Krita and Kexi. Many are longing for the day when the individual components of KOffice are as powerful as the best program in their respective niche, like Inkscape for vector drawings, for instance.
KOffice 1.5.1 is in preparation right now, having been tagged on Thursday. The finer details of this bugfix release can be found in the Changelog.
The big future release is KOffice 2.0, which is being developed at full pace aside from our 1.5 branch commitments. KOffice 2.0 should be generally available in Q1 (probably end of Q1) 2007, in which we expect to have the following major features:
- Platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac OS X
- New canvas
- Flake library
- Support for the Create Freedesktop project, which is a standard for shared graphics resources like brushes, colors, objects, etc.
- New rich text engine with better layout
Flake is going to be the graphics library that will be common to all of KOffice and make all applications behave similarly. The goal of the library is to have the best of both worlds from KWord's frames and KPresenter's shapes down to Karbon's vector graphics. It will support layers, undo/redo and all sorts of manipulation.