Kingsoft Office Is Still Being Ported To Linux

While LibreOffice is currently the most popular office suite on Linux and there's countless of other open-source office / word processor suites out there, one of the longest standing proprietary office suites is still being ported to Linux as well as BSD.

The Kingsoft Office software that's developed in China and its roots trace back to 1988 as the DOS-based Word Processing System, is continuing to see new Linux alpha releases albeit its current adoption levels on Linux are rather limited.

The Kingsoft Office suite uses a Qt-based GUI and is known for its high compatibility with modern Microsoft Office document files but it has no support for ODF. According to multiple user reports, Kingsoft Office does deal better with handling some document elements than LibreOffice/OpenOffice. The Kingsoft Office/WPS software for Linux has been under development since 2012 and was released in June of last year while up through today is still considered in an alpha state. There's also been official communication about Kingsoft Office for FreeBSD, but its state appears even more premature.

The multi-platform office suite is officially hosted at ksosoft.com while the Linux development of the word processing software can be tracked at wps-community.org. The latest Kingsoft Office Linux binary at the time of writing is Linux Alpha 12 Patch 4.