All Linux Things

Happened to look at the WPS Office linux page, and they released a new version quite recently. Amazingly, they actually fixed the multi-year old bug with libpng on Debian based systems. I installed it on a couple of machines to test, 2 debian based and a Fedora. So far, seems pretty decent, although I admit at this point FreeOffice I think has surpassed it, and even LibreOffice has caught up to it in terms of layout (WPS was the first to adopt the "ribbon" interface like MS Office.

Its funny you posted this as I had tried WPS the other day as my wife wanted something similar to MSOffice, even though she likes FreeOffice. We noticed many things were fixed and updated and it was an excellent experience overall. A few distros use it like Feren, a Mint clone with a lot of good user features.

Windows version is very nice and my wife is testing it now after looking at the Linux version. I prefer FreeOffice myself but I dont use MSOffice much at all, as most of my work can be done on simple workd processors like Abiword.

I put WPS on my work laptop (old E6420 w/ Ubuntu actually on the Windows domain, but I grabbed an old 120 GB SSD to speed it up a bit) to test with this week while training our new guy.

So I tested a few files this morning. New Hire information sheets (word), client FTPS spreadsheets, etc. Both LibreOffice and Softmaker/FreeOffice have better compatibility with MS XML documents than WPS office now...

It did most of the spreadsheets rather well, but the word documents it was REALLY bad with. Not so much formatting, but it was actually failing to open some of the text correctly, and just COMPLETELY got it wrong.

We noticed issues as well with WPS but FreeOffice so far is a winner.

WPS isnt going to work out but continued testing of FreeOffice has gone really well and my wife seems to be sold.

Yeah, WPS I remember years ago when they had quite active development had REALLY good compatibility with MS Office, but it's fallen behind. Not just FreeOffice (which has always been pretty good), but also LibreOffice and OnlyOffice.

My wife tried LibreOffice as well and it went pretty well but comparing to FreeOffice doing actual tasks from her business, she seemed to like FreeOffice better, less issues.

So I'm down to 1 machine that still has WPS office on it, it's just not a very good Office Suite anymore IMO.