What was wrong with libre?
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Pretty sure Libre only does local document collaboration, having it online is helpful for teams far from each other or who simply don't have the infrastructure for their own central server of this kind.
Well this has been running in our Nextcloud and works pretty well collaboratively :) https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online not sure how it scales, but definitely an alternative that can be built on
Thanks for this; I may use it to build out my NextCloud server. I’ve already used it to replace shared calendars and contacts.
If you're using Nextcloud All In One then it's easy to enable it in the AIO settings.
If you're not, I suggest looking into it. It's the new officially recommended way of installing and it's been great.
Nextcloud has an export/import data function but at the time I did it I only had a few GB of data so not sure how well it scales.
The web browser is the future, especially for a crappy document editor and spread sheet.
Yes, that's excellent. We need our own Google suite. Fingers crossed so that it may come eventually.
Great news!
This is probably the last hump for me before I can completely degoogle.
I got a kick out of Google Docs alternative since it is trying to be AnyType, AFFiNE, AppFlowy, etc and none of those editors are stupid enough to claim to be Google Docs alternatives nor are they a bloated mess. Proof is in the pudding though... Try putting 1 inch margins on a page & add tab stops with this & printing it out where you get the same results.. oh wait, you can't... Cause it isn't a Google Docs alternative.
None of those tools are editors, right? They all try to be a notion alternative, which is also not an editor. There is basically 0 focus on typesetting.
That is what I'm saying this editor is trying to be Notion, not Google Docs.
Yes, but who said otherwise then?
Oh OP made it up. Nvm. They write themselves that it is a notion alternative.
I disagree. There's Microsoft Office, and there's everything else. Google is in that second bucket.
There's Libre office for those who like freedom and open source tech.
Depends on who you hang with. Pretty much all businesses at this point do collaboration either with Office 365 or with Google Docs, and the same in Academia. Usually it’s a mix of both.
Google docs is trash.
That is fine to have that opinion but it is irrelevant to the discussion since no where did I praise Google Docs. I'm just explaining the difference between this & and editor that does descent typesetting.
And an editor that does a decent job is not google docs.
It is embarassing that MS has dominated this for more than 30 years and Google, despite its infinite wealth, hasn't made a decent office app.
I wholeheartedly agree with this opinion. Google Docs has done very little to innovate. The fact that you're still limited to like 6 built-in styles & lack of integrated syntax highlighting is ridiculous.
Google Docs has done very little to innovate.
The place where I see Google Docs being far superior to any other product I've run into is collaborative work. Having multiple people writing in the same doc at the simultaneously is a train wreck in most products Office365 included. In other products there's a good chance you'll have a version conflict and someone's changes will be lost. Google docs handles that with ease.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue. I first started in college in 2006 with Onenote and it worked well even then. googol is garbage.
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Nice. Where is the source, on github (I didn't see it but I only skimmed)? Federated? Self-hostable?
From briefly looking over the toot, I think the German version is called openDesk (bad choice as there seems to be some interior design software with the same name) there is a community version you can self host in a docker container. They apparently also have distro packages for Debian and Ubuntu but they seem to have stopped development on those.
Here's a link: https://opendesk.eu/en/
openDesk is a complete suite of open source software. I guess Docs could at some point become a part of it. But it‘s not the same thing.
Github: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
Self-hostable, but it seems like an absolute behemoth of an application if their "non-production-use-only" docker-compose file is to be believed, and I couldn't find any production-ready deployment instructions on a quick skim. No obvious signs of federation and I didn't see anything on their roadmap, not sure it would make a lot of sense for this though.
Deployment instructions start with the prerequisite that you have a full kubernetes cluster with ingress laying around, so… yeah. It looks like it'll be on the heavy side.
I love the docs ability to create databases from my docs. That would be super useful for work and research activities.
Oh, you mean a spreadsheet?
No, because with the above you can have rich objects in databases (for example, a dynamically updated list of medical events, each with all the attributes I want, attachments etc.), and almost arbitrarily deep nesting of databases. The idea to have databases with pages is one of the key features that made notion successful. It allows to structure knowledge without duplication, in addition to provide some other no-code features.
Spreadsheets are not even close.
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Right up until you are doing compliance and governance and you realize docs are actually a terrible terrible source of truth for any automated systems. We’re 3 years into a project at a healthcare company to rip google sheets and docs out of our apps and replacing them with Postgres, bigquery, dbt and dagster.
It’s simply not okay to have your database be something anyone with write access to a doc can fuck up a formula by accident on. Your medical bills being maintained by random formulas on dozens of linked spreadsheets maintained by hand by random people on different teams is part of why they are impossible to unwind. By the time someone audits it, it’s printing different numbers than when your bill was rendered and it’s version control doesn’t work to roll it back without breaking dozens of other things.
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ZenDiS is awesome by the way.