LibreOffice and Plasma

At KDAB, we know that consistency is an important aspect of the User Experience - users don’t want to have to learn different ways to achieve the same thing.

For the user this inconsistency is annoying. Take file handling for example: KDE offers a lot of support to the user. They can define important places - like favorite folders, drives, cloud storage -  that allow fast access whenever the user needs to handle files. It follows the KDE idea of navigation through the files, which includes how the user navigates, handling file previews and how the files in a folder are filtered. The file open dialog in GTK is not worse than the KDE one, it is just different. It offers almost the same functionality, but is presented in a way the KDE user is not used to. This can be confusing and frustrating, especially in environments where the user has no choice about the system they have to work with.

While there are multiple backends in LibreOffice, including ones for Qt and KDE, the GTK backend is used by default on most Linux distributions. The limitations it has for KDE users due to the use of GTK dialogs is well known to the LibreOffice community. A lot of effort has already been undertaken to fix this problem. Some ideas even went so far as to migrate large parts of LibreOffice to Qt in order to provide a native feeling for KDE users.

KDAB's contribution

KDAB is a partner for the City of Munich which has installed open source software for all its employees. It runs a KDE-based desktop called Limux for which KDAB provides support. You can see the full story about our work with Limux and the City of Munich here. The City of Munich provides LibreOffice as its Office Suite, so the employees of the City of Munich asked KDAB if we could find a way to fix the problem described above. After some head scratching, we found a successful solution.
The short version is, we found a way to open the KDE dialogs from within LibreOffice so the user experience is seamless - the employees can just get on with their work without being troubled by the software.

How we did it

The overall effort to port LibreOffice to Qt is a huge undertaking. What's more, actually maintaining the code afterwards, is even more work. Could we do something else instead? Turns out, there is prior art here - the KDE/Plasma integration for Firefox! As such, it was decided to first investigate whether a similar hack could achieve a good-enough solution for the short-term in LibreOffice: Use the well-maintained GTK LibreOffice code base, style it with the above-mentioned KDE widget style for GTK, and then intercept calls to open the GTK file dialogs and instead show the KDE file dialogs.
The latter part is, sadly, not as easy as one may first believe, since running both GTK and Qt within the same application can lead to nasty side-effects: Accessing the clipboard through two distinct X11/xcb connections, once from GTK and once from Qt, from one and the same application, can easily deadlock for example. To work around this problem, we moved the KDE file dialogs into an external helper process. This approach has already proven successful for Firefox in the past. As such, it was mostly a matter of reimplementing it for the specific needs of LibreOffice. And, once again, the approach yielded good results and the patches for LibreOffice were also accepted upstream!
Although this is a bit more of a hack than we would normally do, it works! And we believe that, overall, this integration approach is less work in the long term than porting LibreOffice fully to Qt and maintaining it alongside the GTK layer. What's more, as this is an open source project, all of our efforts have been upstreamed and will be available for all LibreOffice users under KDE, not only the employees of the Munich City Council.