Why is Abiword so useless in Kubuntu?

[eldergeek]

I first started using Abiword on a Win98 machine years ago. The version was something like .72 and it was a little buggy but it was free so I was thrilled to put up with the bugs. As buggy as it was, it was easier to use that version of Abi (on a Win98 machine) than it is to use version 2.9.2 on my Kubuntu 12.04 system.

Abi freezes up and/or crashes after a few minutes (sometimes seconds) of use.

I've no idea how Abiword performs on current incarnations of Windows (I haven't used or owned a Windows machine in years) nor have I tried to use it on a gnome or Xfce machine.

Very frustrating. I finally gave up on it and have been learning how to use LibreOffice Writer.

[PaulW2U]

I first started using Abiword on a Win98 machine years ago. The version was something like .72 and it was a little buggy but it was free so I was thrilled to put up with the bugs. As buggy as it was, it was easier to use that version of Abi (on a Win98 machine) than it is to use version 2.9.2 on my Kubuntu 12.04 system.

Abi freezes up and/or crashes after a few minutes (sometimes seconds) of use.

I've no idea how Abiword performs on current incarnations of Windows (I haven't used or owned a Windows machine in years) nor have I tried to use it on a gnome or Xfce machine.

Very frustrating. I finally gave up on it and have been learning how to use LibreOffice Writer.

I try to make a point of not running KDE applications in a GTK version of Ubuntu or running GTK versions of applications in Kubuntu.

Despite assurances from many posters offering their support and assurances that non-native applications will run I have always found problems with certain applications. For a while both Firefox and Thunderbird would freeze permanently on my Kubuntu 13.04 installation and both Emacs 23 and 24 (GTK) will still not run reliably here, sometimes emacs will start, sometimes it won't. Both problems are well documented by myself and others. The bug reports in Launchpad see little or no activity or interest from anyone wanting to fix the problems.

I now dual boot between Kubuntu and Xubuntu so that I know that I can actually run all of my applications in the way that I should be able to as I don't believe that this is something that will be resolved within a reasonable amount of time.

[Teunis]

For probably more than 5 years I had not used Abiword and your post made me curious.
I've just been playing with it for some 15 minutes, opening existing .doc and .odt documents, making new documents with inserted pictures, text boxes etc. and again saving them in .doc and .odt.
For me it seems to work but I see no reason to prefer it over say LibreOffice.
Yes it is a nice and intuitive menu and yes it is quite light, it opens uncomplicated Microsoft documents well rendered.
It displays simple pdf's a lot better than LibreOffice.

But the drop-down menus sometimes don't stay open unless I keep my mouse down, highlighted text changes into a black block, opening a picture does not allow resizing.
These are show stoppers.
These might also be due to my specific video driver, nVidia 313, but I have no other applications with this type of behaviour.

15 minutes isn't much but I can't confirm it crashes every few minutes, at least not on what I fed it.
It was an interesting experiment, for now I'll keep it installed.

[kubicle]

If you're using a recent (precise+) version of kubuntu, you are likely getting abiword 2.9.x from the repos, which is a devel version of abiword making a switch to gtk3.

Most issues/glitches would assumably be because of those two things (switching to gtk3 and being pre-release devel version).

Normally, providing devel versions of software from "stable release" repos is not the best practice, but there is currently a strong push to go gtk3 only (and drop gtk2 software).

[woodsmoke]

I think that the "real" problem is not enough people to maitain all of the small issues....

abiword, as a word processor, has had it's core code been morphed into so many variants that the people who were originally involved had become...

wellll.,....tired....exhausted....

not THEIR problem.....

they need feedback from users and guess what....no . or little, feedback.

woodsmoke