Kingsoft backtracks on halting WPS Office for Linux

[CrAKeN]

 

Last week, we reported that Kingsoft would halt the development of WPS Office for Linux, following tweets that they would open source the code of the office suite later this year and let the community continue work on the software. Kingsoft has now backtracked on what it had said earlier.

 

Kingsoft has deleted its previous tweets which claimed that development had been halted and that the code for the program would be open sourced. Instead, Kingsoft decided dishonesty was the best policy, and accused the media of false reports (link in Chinese).

 

In a statement issued by the company, Kingsoft said:

 

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“WPS Office for Linux does not stop updating and never has any plans to stop updating. WPS and all major domestic Linux vendors have maintained close cooperation and support all the mainstream domestic desktop PC chip, and in April this year, just released for the latest version of the partners.”

Today’s news should be good for Linux users that rely on the closed source office application, which, admittedly looks far better than LibreOffice and feels more familiar to users coming from Microsoft Office.

 

Source

[steven36]

Kingsoft hasn't updated it suite for Linux  for over  a year Microsoft and Google are trying too kill off  the old office suites when WPS said they was not going to support Linux anymore last week and now changed there story over on the Linux Blogs some were having a duck about it,  but it is not like they have  more users than LibreOffice and they sure don't have as Many as Microsoft 

 

Many said they don't care that use Linux and that they use the Free Microsoft Office Online Applications.

https://products.office.com/en-gb/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online

Also some use Google Docs

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Google Docs provides all the features of the Microsoft Online office tools and is largely because of these tools that Microsoft had to release their own online versions. If absolute strict compatibility isn't on your list, you'd be silly to look elsewhere for an online suite.

 

https://www.google.com/docs/about/

This  Generation today  do everything in the cloud and   don't care about there privacy as long it's free.

 

To install Kingsoft  on Ubuntu 17.04 you have do a work around  because it has a missing dependency  ..You have too install libpng12-0_1.2.54-1ubuntu1 1st and then install it. So it never has been updated for the latest release.  

 

I tested it and it works by doing this workaround

 

 

[insanedown58]

It's a shame they haven't updated this software for Linux. It's really great compared to LibreOffice or other offerings on Linux. I looked at the forum today and it's sad to see that the most recent post related to the software was about it being an abandoned project while the rest of the posts are just spam.

[steven36]

8 hours ago, insanedown58 said:

It's a shame they haven't updated this software for Linux. It's really great compared to LibreOffice or other offerings on Linux. I looked at the forum today and it's sad to see that the most recent post related to the software was about it being an abandoned project while the rest of the posts are just spam.

Linux is not like Windows no ways many projects become abandoned and new ones created ..But if the project is open source it can be forked and kept going  . This is one the  drawbacks about using closed sourced software on Linux is no one can fork it too keep it working but Kingsoft Office 2016 will keep working on Linux Mint 18x , Peppermint 8 and Ubuntu 16.04.x LTS tell April 2021 the work around is working in newer versions too if you must have it .