Is libreoffice online a viable alternative to gdocs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16683022

by rlvesco7 • 8 years ago

120 51 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

LibraMelody• 8 years ago

Apparently google search is also what's tying you to google. I say that to say google will have measures to stifle competition (no matter what they say otherwise). Also, what's the issue with just running LibreOffice on your computer? They also have portable versions which you can just put on your thumb drive

ams6110• 8 years ago

what's the issue with just running LibreOffice on your computer

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.

njarboe• 8 years ago

Dropbox does file sharing better than anybody, I think. Share with yourself and others. Pay a small fee for a better product and know it they have an incentive to please you. You can use any software products when sharing with Dropbox. I have been happy with it for many years and have never had any problems, knock on wood.

rlvesco72• 8 years ago

Ease of sharing is precisely why it's so powerful. I can send a link to a shared spreadsheet without the person having to login. Very little friction. Also, being able to co-edit in real time is very powerful. I think libreoffice offline is great, but for 80% of my use cases, gdocs is more convenient and useful. But I'm no longer comfortable with google having so much of my personal and business life.

askvictor2• 8 years ago

When I search Google for "collaborative online word processor" Google Docs doesn't appear on the first page; it's mostly sites with comparisons of available systems, along with Zoho, Etherpad and Office.

askvictor2• 8 years ago

Other options include Zoho Writer, Apple Pages (has web-based version), MS Word Online. I seem to remember an OSS effort to make one (other than libreoffice online) but can't remember what it was.

cetra3• 8 years ago

Surprised noone has mentioned OnlyOffice here: https://www.onlyoffice.com/.

We use it via the integration I wrote for Alfresco: https://github.com/cetra3/onlyoffice-alfresco

rlvesco72• 8 years ago

Never heard of OnlyOffice! They had a good comparison between them and libreoffice/collabora: https://medium.com/onlyoffice/onlyoffice-vs-collabora-a-crit...

aepiepaey• 8 years ago

That's not a good comparison. It's just an advertising piece bashing Collabora.

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/

akkat• 8 years ago

FYI they do not support RTL languages yet https://github.com/ONLYOFFICE/DocumentServer/issues/19

JackPoach• 8 years ago

OnlyOffice is pretty good.

blendergeek2• 8 years ago

LibreOffice Online is a viable alternative in my opinion. It integrates with NextCloud and allows you to easily share and collaborate. You can even get a "share link" for your documents like in Google Docs. There are some caveats though. Latency is unacceptable. Google Docs renders documents client side allowing characters that you type to immediately echo to the screen. LibreOffice renders documents server side with a noticeable lag. LibreOffice has the benefit of better interoperability with MS Word than Google Docs has.

I would also recommend trying OnlyOffice as some have recommended.

elmigranto• 8 years ago

"Viable alternative" with its "unacceptable latency" amounts to being just a viewer, which are dime a dozen, including most phones doing that out of the box, countless JS libraries and browser extensions, and every storage service like Dropbox having, if not basic editor, then at least very competent viewer.

I guess it's a start…

blendergeek2• 8 years ago

I am willing to put up with the latency because I really do want to do anything with Google. And I only recently learned about OnlyOffice which seems a more viable solution going forward.

pbreit2• 8 years ago

No. GDocs is one of the best pieces of software in existence. Each component is very capable on its own. The sharing turbo charges it past all others. You’d have to really be a google hater to choose not to use it.

saagarjha• 8 years ago

What? The only thing I like about Google Docs is the sharing part. The rest of it is a slow, bloated web app that is limited in the number of features it has.

miaklesp• 8 years ago

The best pieces of software is Office 365. GDocs just free but vendor-locked.

pbreit2• 8 years ago

How is gDocs more vendor locked than Office?

zeth___• 8 years ago

Or just need a good spread sheet program.

philliphaydon• 8 years ago

Maybe if you’re a chrome user. But using Firefox I hate Google docs.

sandGorgon• 8 years ago

Softmaker Office is pretty good. And works on all platforms (including Linux). http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

hpcjoe• 8 years ago

One specifically negative thing about gdocs ... well ... gsheets ... is that if you create a document with many (e.g. > 5 or so) charts on a single page ... it will slow waaaaaaayyyyy down. Multi second latency/response times for things like scrolling, cell interaction, etc. It becomes effectively unusable.

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).

walrus01• 8 years ago

Gsheets is utterly useless for importing and browsing a several MB size CSV file. Where the same file imported into native x64 libreoffice is totally smooth.

muzani• 8 years ago

Gdocs also slows down massively when opening something past a dozen MB.

newsat132• 8 years ago

You should ask reddit's /r/selfhosted. HN crowd is not much into self-hosting

acct1771• 8 years ago

Heh, isn't this where Sandstorm was introduced...?

newsat132• 8 years ago

Sandstorm is popular as a technology but most people here don't use it. Most sandstorm users hang out on the irc.

kqr3• 8 years ago

For Google Docs-like tasks I prefer a combination of Org and git.

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.

zakk• 8 years ago

Your comment implies that there are other editors, besides Emacs, supporting Org mode...

Could you please elaborate on this?

kqr3• 8 years ago

I intended that implication, but I don't think I have a whole lot more to say about it, unfortunately.

- 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.

andreasmaurer• 8 years ago

https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

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.

joelchrist• 8 years ago

This is assuming that the people you're collaborating with know how to use git ... That's a big assumption to make

kqr3• 8 years ago

Barely any git knowledge is required to cowboy commit onto the default branch on GitHub using their web editor. The result is no different than what it would be using Google Docs.

(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.)

midgetjones• 8 years ago

(I'm not looking, but) I would work for you in a flash if that's how you do things. I'm the only Org user in my team, and I wish they'd see the light!

krptos• 8 years ago

Not sure if anybody mentioned Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com)

I find it has more formatting features than Google Docs. Best of all: no Ads and document reading bullshit.

known• 8 years ago

Discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563009

davidgerard• 8 years ago

It's had considerable development in the past two years.

nkkollaw• 8 years ago

LibreOffice is one of the software I like the least.

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.

nikosmme• 8 years ago

A full suite of SaaS open source tools there : https://framasoft.org/

hennsen• 8 years ago

Why does the title not contain a link as normal hn posts?

The link below is not clickable, must be copied and pasted manually... no fun on mobile...

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

This is intentional:

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.

captainbland• 8 years ago

There's also NextCloud, although you'll need to pay for it or host it yourself.

illlogic2• 8 years ago

Honest question, can you just run simple symmetric encryption on your data before uploading to gapps?

juliangoldsmith• 8 years ago

OP's use case for Google Docs seems to be editing. Encrypting your document would mean that you wouldn't be able to edit it using Google Docs.

jdanielricher• 8 years ago

just use graphitedocs.com

Is libreoffice online a viable alternative to gdocs?

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