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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.
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.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue.
You’ve had 60+ people all in a single Excel spreadsheet on Sharepoint all making changes at the exact same moment and never once had a issue of a document lock or file corruption? Its okay to have a preference for one product over the other, but when you’re blinded by brand loyalty where you can see no wrong with your preferred product, it makes you lose credibility.
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.
ZenDiS is awesome by the way.
Surprised they didn’t go with cryptpad - aren’t they already French?
Cryptpad is French, but they are using OnlyOffice, which is Russian.
Is there any evidence of any wrongdoing or are we just considering all open source software from Russia a bad actor by default?
Yes, there is evidence. Did you read the linked post?
I wouldn’t have any problems with it if it were just free open source software. But they also offer paid services. Internationally they do that through their Latvian based subsidiary, obfuscating their origin. At home in Russia their suite is renamed R7-Office, which is a reference to the first ICBM with a nuclear warhead. The release imagery also depicts the release of a rocket that looks like the R-7.
Altogether pretty sus, if you ask me.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Fuck :( Didn’t know that… I got convinced by the company being supposedly Latvian.
It is Latvian. It’s also Russian. It’s also Singaporean. It just depends on who you ask and how much you want to look into it.
But yeah, that’s a large part of why I use Collabora instead of OnlyOffice, it’s just a lot less sketchy.
Just checked the part about self-hosting. While it’s probably possible to handle things with a less heavy approach, their only “easy to use” example right now is to have a full-blown kubernetes cluster at hand or run locally in the source directory. That’s a bit much.
Honestly, k8s is super easy and very lightweight to run locally if you know the rights tools. There are a few good options but I prefer k3d. I can install Docker/k3d and also build a local cluster running in maybe 2 minutes. It’s excellent for local dev. Even good for production in some niche scenarios
I don’t like the approach of piling more things on top of even more things to achieve the same goal as the base, frankly speaking. A “local” kubernetes cluster serve no purpose other than incredible complexity for little to no gain over a mere docker-compose. And a small cluster would work equally well with docker swarm.
A service, even made of multiple parts, should always be described that way. It’s easy to move “up” the stack of complexity, if you so desire. Having “have a k8s cluster with helm” working as the base requirement sounds insane to me.
Honestly, a lot of the time I don’t understand why a lot of businesses use k8s.
At my company especially, we know almost exactly what our traffic will look like from 9am-5pm. We don’t really need flexible scaling, yet we still use it because the technology is hyped. Similar to cloud, we certainly don’t need to be spending as much as we do, but since everyone else is on or migrating to the cloud, we are as well.
The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.
The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.
A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.
Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.
Thanks for the response!
I personally haven’t rolled a k8s or k3s cluster, so it’s always felt a bit abstract to me. I probably should though, to demystify it to myself in my work environment.
Complex is definitely what I have noticed when I see my devops team PR into the ingress directories.
I guess the abstract issue I see, that ties in to the meme i shared above, is that sometimes around deploys where we get blips of 503/4’s and we appear to be unable to track them down. Is it the load balancer? Ingress? Kong? The fact that there is so many layers make infra issues rough to debug
I mean yeah it’s all very complex for sure. Managing a cluster is very involved and k8s administration is typically a completely separate role from dev/devops. I am comfortable with the idea and I still run my selfhosted setup on docker because it’s easier and I have no personal use for multi-node setups.
However when you get down to it pretty much everything in k8s solves a real problem that in a “traditional” infra would require lots of ad-hoc bullshit. The ingress system of k8s is, at a high level, a standardized recreation of the typical “haproxy+nginx+ad-hoc provisioning” setup you’d find in a “classical” private cloud deployment. TLS in, send to nginx, nginx chooses a relevant healthy back-end and reverse proxies the request. K8s doesn’t really do anything crazy complex, the complexity is just inherent to having a many-to-many mapping of HTTP requests while optionally supporting multi-zone setups with local affinity and lifecycle management/awareness.
But unlike with a traditional deployment there’s not a greybeard guru in the back who deployed it all and knows the ins-and-outs so it’s quite common that the complexity is not understood and underappreciated by the “admins”. That complexity is a blessing when you need to leverage it but a curse when you lack the expertise to understand what is happening holistically.
Kind of like a linux distro… It’s amazing when it works but when libpam throws an error and you don’t even know what that library is or does, well you’re in for a fun evening.
Kubernetes is not really meant primarily for scaling. Even kubernetes clusters require autoscaling groups on nodes to support it, for example, or horizontal pod autoscalers, but they are minor features.
The benefits are pooling computing resources and creating effectively a private cloud. Easy replication of applications in case of hardware failure. Single language to deploy applications, network controls, etc.
Yea I’m not a fan of helm either. In fact, I avoid charts when possible. But kustomize is great.
I feel the same way about docker compose. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m biased in favor of k8s. I like and prefer that interface. But that’s just preference. If you like docker compose, great!
There’s one point where I do disagree however. There are scenarios where a local k8s cluster has a good and clear purpose. If your production environment runs on k8s, then it’s best to mirror that locally as much as possible. In fact, there are many apps that even require a k8s api to run. Plus, being able to destroy and rebuild your entire k8s cluster in 30s is wonderful for local testing.
Edit: typos
I won’t argue with the ups and downs of each technos, but I recently looked into docker swarms and it was all I expected kubernetes to be, without the hassle. And I could also get a full cluster with services restored from scratch in 30s. But I am obviously biased towards it, too :)
Did not realize swarm was still a thing, not trying to be offensive here.
My best find was using traefik as a reverse proxy in docker (compose). It is easily configurable through container labels and pulls resource definitions straight from docker. It is awesome!
Seconding k3d (and, by extension, k3s). If you’re in a market for sth suitable for more upstream-compliant clustering solution (k3s uses SQLite instead of etcd, iirc), RKE2 is also a great choice
k8s is overkill for a lot of homelabs. Using docker compose is a fraction of that complexity
There are many reasons to use k8s. Managing multiple nodes is one good one. But more importantly, k8s gives you an api-driven runtime environment. It’s really not comparable to docker compose.
Yes if single node, kinda if 2-3 nodes, no for anything above that IMHO.
In the README there’s also instructions for Docker Compose, although it’s quite the compose file, with SIXTEEN containers defined. Not something I’d want to self-host.
it seems to contains development containers and external services containers. So the compose file is more for local dev it seems
What i do find weird is the choice for Django for the backend. Python is incredibly slow, and django rest framework is even worse.
Please develop this self hosted version using sandstorm
It makes hosting a breeze with one click installation
What was wrong with libre?
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.
Then just use Word online.
Not FOSS and probably not privacy friendly
Great news!
This is probably the last hump for me before I can completely degoogle.
Nice. Where is the source, on github (I didn’t see it but I only skimmed)? Federated? Self-hostable?
https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
Self-hostable, needs Minio (or any S3 compatible system).
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.
Yes, that’s excellent. We need our own Google suite. Fingers crossed so that it may come eventually.
What does this do over what the collabora tools in Nextcloud do?
NGL I keep forgetting NextCloud has collaboration tools.
Is this just for EU citisens or can Americans like me use it?
Foss, just deploy and enjoy
Don’t know what a Foss is
free and open source software
I was going to make a joke but honestly it’s refreshing and a good sign that Lemmy is starting to get used by people who don’t know what FOSS means now. Welcome.
Free open source software
Nice to see Lemmy is not just a place for complete nerds!
FOSS is free and open-source software. In simple terms, it is any program for which the source code (i.e. the actual code that forms the program, its entire backbone) is available for anyone to see and modify as they see fit, without any technical or legal limitations.
This is normally seen as very positive, because everyone with the knowledge of respective programming languages can inspect the program to see it doesn’t do anything malicious, and everyone can change the program to their needs. Also, the original creator of the program does not have power to put any limitations on its use, like introducing payment requirements, or deleting important features, because everyone can immediately spawn a version of the program that doesn’t have these changes, while still having the rest.
So… how do I use it? I tried signing up on the site, but… it said something about an organization it was poorly transltaed from French to English, so I couldn’t tell what I was doing… I got as far as registering my current email address
It might be a bit early for you. It’s in a way like Lemmy, somebody has to put it on a server and let you use it.
It’s meant for government agencies to deploy and use (although anybody with some self hosting knowledge can do on their servers, including hobbiests and companies)
FOSS (free and open source software) is software that is completely open source and is free for everyone to use. It’s much harder to enshittify, and if it ever does people can fork (make a copy, and make their own changes to the software).
In case you didn’t understood by now, it’s free open source software
So how do I use it?
Here is a get started guide -> https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started-
Nice, DINUM is doing a lot so great to see go beyond with supra national collaboration!
I’m using NextCloud (Germany and international open source community) hosted on Webo (Slovenia) with data centers in Germany and Helsinki (so I bet on Hetzner). I’m happy with it but I’ll keep on eye on https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
I’d be curious, they use Minio which puts S3 first. Does it mean Docs (the official instance) is relying on AWS?
If so IMHO that’s not a great default EU sovereignty.
FWIW if others are curious https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/755 opened an issue
I thought that MinIO is a Open-Source S3 implementation, which you can just install on your own system. S3 is a “protocol” here IIUC.
Is your complaint that they are using the S3 protocol, because it was invented and is controlled by AWS?
Or that some services might use it without MinIO, directly on AWS?
Seems I misunderstood, if it’s solely the branding (of that implementation) then it’s fine. I thought they relied on AWS itself.
I would assume (without having looked at the codebase) that if they use minio they are, by default, not reliant on AWS.
Minio is its own S3 implementation which can be self-hosted.
S3, being an AWS protocol originally has
AWSenvironment variables all over the place but that does not necessarily mean a reliance on the service. Rather, they rely on the protocol and you bring your own S3 endpoint I would assume. be that minio, hetzner or what have you.Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense, closing the issue then.
Pretty good project, but is it the future to have mainly web apps?
For offline editing there’s already LibreOffice
A bit of both I guess
Web apps have the advantage of not requiring admin permission and being accessible from pretty much everywhere, and they are often less intensive I believe
And I guess cloud storage of documents makes it even better
no office software requires admin eighter unless you want to install it for all users
it’s often a pain to install in computers that don’t have it by default, like school computers or similar, but alright, didn’t know it!
+some people don’t like installing stuff
+you can’t collaborate with other people on the default LibreOffice I iirc
I guess I don’t mind if I can self host the server. If I can’t I have no interest in touching it.
For sure! self hosting is the way
True: self hosting is beneficial, Foss office suite is great to empower us, users… etc.
The point of the software presented isn’t aimed at regular computer users that would enjoy a bit of independence, it looks more like something aimed at the enterprise administrative level that people may stumble upon while searching for a document (who needs versioning apart from filename extensions if you alone work on the documents).See it as: you may find , download and use updated packaged software on github but in reality it’s really a tool aimed at devs before being a software repository for end users.
I see this as software mainly for the French or German state administration being made public for others to enrich, integrate… Like Olvid is a matrix based E2E encrypted, real authenticated identity based messenger made available to the public once the French government financed it’s development for it’s own use.
A good web app is awesome!
But the big ones usually wants to have a native app so that they can scan your whole computer and so on. This is good news.
which is fine if you deny network connections for it with a per-process firewall. but with a webapp you can never be sure that they won’t snatch your documents.
Depends, if it is open source then you just host it yourself for your organisation.
Bro has been sleeping under a rock for the past 10 years.
It’s definitely been the direction of travel for the last several years. Not because the products are better, but because it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
They also work on android and IOS. You are also not dependent on the different toolkits. Also it is so much more performant.
They also work on android and IOS.
I can imagine it’ll be a 160 MB app that loads the website in a webview, like it usually is
I’ve never found them to be more performant, and i can’t understand the logic of why a programme running inside another programme would be more performant except in comparison to unoptimised alternatives.
I’ve never used a web app that i thought was better than a local app. But i definitely understand why developers prefer them.
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.
Exactly. Engineering research test write ups and results could be quickly searched for in a good document database.
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I’m in the engineering business. We have a PDM system that we check-in copies of component 3D models, PDF drawings and DOCs. Once your team has collaborated enough, you have a copy…once a week/day/hour depending on your preference. That way you can collaborate and keep frozen records and rev controlled documents.
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If I can copy and paste with thought having to install the offline plugin, then I’m in.
Yeah, it is called Word. Works on all computers, is free to use the web based version, and is the world standard.
Proprietary bullshit
It does not work on my work-computer, since office macros and some formatting renders differently across versions. Other required software constraints make windows unusable for me.
Hey, this is a Python project, use underscores.
Word won’t install on machine.
LibreOffice does, though.
Maybe I missed something, but since when Word is not only an alternative to an office suite, but also a web-based one?
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But even a web-based version of Word can’t be a Google Docs alternative, because Word can’t into spreadsheets and presentations.
