Productivity on any operating system is without doubt one of the most important things that can make or break a platform however, execution is the key – if done right, enterprise adaptation would be shortly underway.

Linux today is most certainly an ultimate viable alternative to Windows – both in the general consumer and business market.

Read Also: Most Commonly Used Windows Applications for Linux

If you’re quite familiar with the fact that the ecosystem of any platform (i.e, the apps available to it) determines its success then you will know by now that Firefox OS and Sailfish likewise (which are alternative mobile platforms to Android and iOS) aren’t where they ought to be particularly because they lacked the extensive array of apps to attract users like their counterparts.

Productivity on Linux had terribly lacked in the past and adaptation was rather hard and impossible for most during it’s earlier days – fast forward two decades later and we have an abundant of apps tailored to the specific needs for Linuxers and extremely user-friendly operating systems for newcomers in the Linux world.

When we talk about productivity the first thing that comes to mind mostly is an office suite before anything else – and more specifically, Microsoft office or it’s immediate competitor, LibreOffice.

While we may have these two as the most popular, they are not necessarily the best and the former is not native to Linux.

We’ve made a comprehensive list of Office suites available for the Linux platform in this article totaling 16 – most of which are cross platform too – essentially making them alternatives to the Microsoft Office suite available on competing desktop platforms (Windows and OSX) out there and even the mobile ones.

1. LibreOffice

This office suite is essentially a fork of the used-to-be well-known Openoffice. It features support for most formats native to MS Office suite including doc, docs, xlsx etc., alongside many other open document standards.

Libreoffice is cross-platform and features a word processor – Writer, spreadsheets – Calc, Presentation – Impress and many others.

Asides its feature set, LibreOffice is also customizable with a varying number of icon sets available on its website and added functionalities as plugins.

For installation instructions visit: Install LibreOffice in Linux Systems

2. Apache OpenOffice

OpenOffice has quite a lot in common with LibreOffice given that they share the same underlying code. Development on OpenOffice has somewhat lagged behind LibreOffice particularly because of its slow development cycle which was one of the main reasons LibreOffice broke off from them back in the day, however, OpenOffice remains a viable alternative with many of the functions available in LibreOffice and many years of development work.

Also, OpenOffice is cross-platform with availability on Windows, OSX, and Linux.

For installation instructions visit: Install Apache OpenOffice in Linux Systems

3. Calligra Suite

Calligra is one of the oldest open-sourse Office suites that has been in active development for the well part of 15 years and was formally known as KOffice.

It’s a Qt-based office solution built around the the KDE desktop environment but still available for other platforms.

Under Calligra is a host of suites for almost all forms of productivity work including the popular image manipulation software known as Krita.

Calligra Words – word processor Calligra Sheets – spreadsheet Calligra Stage – presentation Calligra Author – used to make Epubs Calligra Plan – project planner Krita – paint Calligra Flow (formerly Kivio) – flowchart designer Karbon (formerly Karbon14) – vector graphics Braindump – mind-mapping and notes application Kexi – database manager

Visit Homepage: https://www.calligra.org/

4. WPS Office

WPS otherwise (writer presentation and spreadsheets), has quickly grown to become of the most-used productivity suites especially due to its modernized look and availability on the most used desktop platforms and mobile alike.

WPS used to be Kingsoft Office and was born in June 2013. The program’s code is proprietary and has the free and premium side of things with premium offerings that include, over 230 fonts, documents collaboration, advanced spreadsheets, documents encryption et ‘al.

However, the free versions of the mobile and desktop apps alike offer quite a lot for free including online templates and a modernized UI which is not something most of the office suites in this article can exactly boast of.

WPS is today featured as the default Office suite in many Linux-based distros such as Deepin OS.

The Kingsoft made office suite supports all MS Office formats and also features some proprietary formats of its own known one of which is .wps.

Visit Homepage: https://www.wps.com/