WPS Office 2016 for Linux Released

[kpedersen]

Huh? That's cross-arch compatibility, not software lifespan. Also since x86 isn't anywhere near in danger of disappearing.

It is more complex than that. For example, running i386 programs on an x86_64 OS isn't fully native but requires a relatively complex translation layer as done by WOW64 on Windows and kernel hacks on Linux. Not all operating systems I am interested in provide this functionality. C source code kinda solves this.

But compatibility issues can even arrise on the same architecture, for example, an i386 binary running on RedHat 9, will likely have issues running on a modern i386 RHEL6+ due to mismatching libc and other linked libraries (statically linking can only go so far but wont work for ancient kernels unlike source). Depending on how portably the source is written, C source code also solves this since it will just link against installed versions.

for 99.999999% of users the above is irrelevant.

... until it hits them in the face and then pay developers lots of money to re-implement a piece of software (and go through the whole churn of bug fixing again).

[Ardje]

Wait a sec, twiki is a wiki. What is the spreadsheet extension you are talking about?

Other than that, I really need to try out latex someday, I'm sick of wrestling with buggy WYSIWYG editors that force me to create invisible tables and fake spaces and other shenanigans to keep text and other stuff placed and aligned like I want it.

twiki is a structural wiki.. you can | 1 | 2 | 4 | %CALC{$LEFT()}% | to total the single row table.
I use it to total out all my invoices and calculate my tax report, as the %CALC...% is done over the result of a %SEARCH{all invoice topics}
It also holds all my invoices and actually is my bookkeeping "software". My tax consultant has straight access to that wiki and uses that for yearly reports or tax inquiries.
Invoice are created per cli in latex (which are all put in git), and those invoices I upload using curl to twiki.
For invoices and general letters I use isodoc with a local predefined style.
This is daily stuff... For my computer illiterate girlfriend I have a webform frontend for her invoices.
She also writes letters that way. Which is so much better, because I don't even know where to begin if she should use "word". Also address labels are printed on the correct place for see-through envelopes.
Now for long documents things are usually a bit simpler.
isodoc is packaged in texlive-latex-extra on debian.