Is libreoffice online a viable alternative to gdocs? https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ The only thing keeping me with google is gdocs. But I'd rather not keep my private data with them. Libre office online does not appear in google search an an alternative and hn has mostly ignored it. Is it not ready for prime time? |
We use it via the integration I wrote for Alfresco: https://github.com/cetra3/onlyoffice-alfresco
If it had been a good comparison, it would have listed pros and cons of both solutions, rather than only pros for one, and only cons for the other.
The "comparison" really only points out three issues:
Collabora runs an instance of Libreoffice on the server. This must be taken into account when considering resource limits when scaling, and latency and bandwidth to the client(s).
Collabora's handling of OOXML (.docx/.xlsx/.pptx) is much worse than OnlyOffice's. You must take them at their word for this!
For collaborative editing, modes (bold/italic/font sizes etc), Collabora uses the same state for all clients. You must take their word for this. I also tested Collabora very briefly (using NextCloud's demo[1]), and the toolbar is client side, which means it could very well be that modes are not shared.
Of course, none of this is particularly surprising considering it was posted by OnlyOffice themselves.
[1]: Instant trial on https://demo.nextcloud.com/
I would also recommend trying OnlyOffice as some have recommended.
I guess it's a start…
The key advantage to Google Docs, an otherwise ordinary if not fairly lightweight word processer, is the ease of sharing (even if only with yourself on multiple devices) and collaborating with others.
I've never heard of LibreOffice online, but depending how well it does those things, it might or might not be viable.
As a word processor alone, Google Docs is nothing special and LibreOffice probably has more features.
Gdocs as a whole are ok, though you are giving Google the right to read your docs as I remember (in their terms of service).
Org is a powerful-but-easy-to-learn document structuring language. You ca write it in any editor, but in an Org-aware editor your document really comes alive. The oldest, most feature-complete implementation is in Emacs. Org documents can be exported to virtually any final format.
I don't specifically recommend git so much as any distributed VCS, to share changes with collaborators in a controlled and structured way. I find it much easier to catch up on other's work when it comes as a self-contained, clearly labeled commit in the correct branch rather than a jumble of tiny edits here and there.
If you are working with lazy people who don't want to learn stuff, you may want to consider whether you'd be okay with keeping your private data with GitHub instead. If your Org document lives in a repo there, anyone with commit access can edit it in the GitHub web editor, with a formatted preview available.
I find it has more formatting features than Google Docs. Best of all: no Ads and document reading bullshit.
The link below is not clickable, must be copied and pasted manually... no fun on mobile...
How do I make a link in a question?
You can't. This is to prevent people from submitting a link with their comments in a privileged position at the top of the page. If you want to submit a link with comments, just submit it, then add a regular comment.
It's super-ugly, doesn't have hidpi support on Linux, it's slow, it has a confusing UI.
Google Docs is about 100 times better.
(Though, every person on the team who wants to learn git is a strict incremental improvement – both over Google Docs and cowboy committing on GitHub.)
Could you please elaborate on this?
- On my Android phone, I use Orgzly to capture notes, tick off finished tasks, and see various filtered views of my agenda.
- I see there are implementations in Vim, namely Vim-OrgMode and VimOrganizer.
- If you want to embed something on the web, org-js is supposed to be good. There is also the GitHub editor, of course.
- Further out of my comfort zone, there is something for IntelliJ IDEA called org4idea, and I saw you should be able to get orgmode support in Sublime Text. I also found Organized for Atom, but that appears to be a sort of Markdown-Org mashup, so not necessarily the right thing.
- Then, as unwelcome as this last point may seem to some, it's worth pointing out that Emacs is not an editor in singular. If you don't like the default editor that ships with Emacs, there are other editors to choose from which all run in Emacs. This includes the seriously fantastic Vim port called Evil. From what I can tell, the AutOrg project is even specifically packaging Emacs+Org in a way to make it more approachable to beginners.
Note that many of the options have not successfully replicated the full Org feature set yet. However, in the context of this discussion I have limited myself to the features that are also supported by Google Docs, which are... not many.
https://atom.io/packages/org-mode
https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode
https://github.com/danielmagnussons/orgmode
For more, search "[name of editor] org mode" in the search engine of your trust.
You can easily have three people editing the same paragraph in google docs; whether libreoffice online is a viable alternative depends on how it handles that.
GSuite is ok when it works most times, when it doesn't it's a nightmare. Google is literally the worst company I've ever done business with. In fact, over the past decade I've had to reach out to various support levels on different products and can say they stand at a remarkable 0% solve rate. (Chromium's bug tracker I've had some success with but it's not 100% a Google product)
The latest contract breech I've had with them is regarding their SLA agreement. We had a client's account become inaccessible for a week. This caused them 2 days of work downtime as their quotes and business correspondence were all tied up in the account. The SLA defines a Downtime as:
"Downtime" means, for a domain, if there is more than a five percent user error rate. Downtime is measured based on server side error rate.
We wrote about the issue, figured out the cause was likely due to an error in the half-assed rollout of the new admin panel (they currently have two in production), and yet we were not granted a half-month credit for the downtime as the SLA stipulated.
This is the agreement that I was referring to: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html
Specifically, see section 5.2.
Also, Google advertises this as a feature to G Suite users: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
Not a great source (it's a while ago), but I was at a talk from I think a Google AI researcher once (he might've been a VP). I remember him saying that Google hasn't actually been scanning emails for a long time now, because they're processing too many emails for even Google to parse. Too big data.