Can Kingsoft Office be installed?

Yes, you can. At this time Kingsoft office (known as WPS office in China) has a official beta version for Linux, you can found more information in their official website.

After installing the debian installer, the office suite is initially in Chinese locale. To make it in English, you can

cd /opt/kingsoft/wps-office/office6/cfgs
sudo nano setup.cfg

Then change the line “UILanguage=2052” to

UILanguage=default

1. Download the latest linux Kingsoft Office package from

   http://wps-community.org/download.html

2. Run

   sudo dpkg -i kingsoft-office_9.1.0.4184~a12p1_i386.deb
   

   Change kingsoft-office_9.1.0.4184~a12p1_i386.deb for the name of the package actually downloaded.

3. Voilà

Note #1: If you had installed Kingsoft Office for Linux Beta1 (wps-office_8.1.0.3724~b1p2_i386.deb), you must remove that one first.

Kingsoft Office (also called WPS Office) will keep nagging about MS Office fonts needed. The options are to ignore it and go ahead with your life, or download and install them from http://wps-community.org/download/fonts/ on your machine. Note that these fonts are not the ones you get with ttf-mscorefonts-installer.

Note #2: Starting from Kingsoft Office for Linux Alpha12 Patch1 (released 2013-09-18), the program will notify the user of upgrades.

Now, LibreOffice is definitely superior (and it supports MS Office files), but if you are forced to work and share a lot Microsoft Office files, you might want to give it a try: for the little that I've seen, in some cases the .docx et al. files appear better (or closely to how they look in Windows; layout, tables and all) under Kingsoft Office than with LO. Your mileage may vary.

I haven't used it too much, nor I have to work mostly with MS Office files, and the improvements I've seen occur in a just few examples; so my verdict is that the advantages are, at this point, marginal if any. And this is a non-libre software.

Or maybe you just want to see for yourself the tabbed interface, which many of us would like to have in the future in LibreOffice.

I tested this in Ubuntu 12.04.

Pre 12.04

No.

• There is no native installer;
• Wine shows it with a garbage or bronze rating. In the best situation ("bronze") it still did not work well enough that it would likely be practically usable. (See the details.)

What can Kingsoft Office do that you can not do with LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice Writer and/or AbiWord?