Softmaker FreeOffice

http://freeoffice.com/

free for commercial use as they say: You may use it perpetually, and it is licensed both for home and for business use
http://freeoffice.com/en/download/freeofficewindows

compatible with win8

I used old versions (2008 - 2010 - ashampoo 2010) and I'm realy happy with.
I don't know if Kingsoft Office is better or not, I try and I think are almost the same in compatibility with M$ Office (both are not the best with particular docx file) but for sure Softmaker is better for not english users because GUI is in our native language (Kingsoft is only english) and the spellcheck dictionary is easy to install and there are a lot of languages available
http://freeoffice.com/en/download/dictionaries

Plus: developers quickly solve issues you post in their forum

 

I also have been using the free SoftMaker Textmaker 2008 and Textmaker Viewer 2010 for years. Then I later discovered Kingsoft Writer.

Embedded graphics in Kingsoft Writer vs Textmaker Viewer 2010: Kingsoft is 99.99% identical to Microsoft Word 2003 (I don't have the newer versions to compare). TextMaker is ... not nearly as pretty.

I still prefer SoftMaker because there's a way to make it portable, while Kingsoft doesn't offer any "official" portable version. It seems as bloated as Word in terms of registry keys.