
Is libreoffice online a viable alternative to gdocs? - rlvesco7
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.collaboraoffice.com&#x2F;code&#x2F;<p>The only thing keeping me with google is gdocs. But I&#x27;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?
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cetra3
Surprised noone has mentioned OnlyOffice here:
[https://www.onlyoffice.com/](https://www.onlyoffice.com/).

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

~~~
rlvesco7
Never heard of OnlyOffice! They had a good comparison between them and
libreoffice/collabora: [https://medium.com/onlyoffice/onlyoffice-vs-collabora-
a-crit...](https://medium.com/onlyoffice/onlyoffice-vs-collabora-a-critical-
comparison-18a5ba0dee62)

~~~
aepiepaey
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/](https://demo.nextcloud.com/)

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blendergeek
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
"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…

~~~
blendergeek
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.

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newsat13
You should ask reddit's /r/selfhosted. HN crowd is not much into self-hosting

~~~
acct1771
Heh, isn't this where Sandstorm was introduced...?

~~~
newsat13
Sandstorm is popular as a technology but most people here don't use it. Most
sandstorm users hang out on the irc.

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LibraMelody
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
> 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.

~~~
rlvesco7
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.

~~~
tonyztan
Have you considered G Suite? If you are going to stick with Google Docs, at
least you can get a legal agreement that bars Google from mining or otherwise
using your documents.

~~~
joecool1029
What legal agreement? It's not like they won't weasel out of it anyway. I'm
fairly certain they were scanning emails for ad targeting up until the past
year or so.

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.

~~~
tonyztan
> "What legal agreement?"

This is the agreement that I was referring to:
[https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html](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](https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en)

------
nikosmme
A full suite of SaaS open source tools there :
[https://framasoft.org/](https://framasoft.org/)

------
askvictor
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.

------
hpcjoe
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
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.

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

Could you please elaborate on this?

~~~
kqr
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.

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

------
pbreit
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.

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

~~~
pbreit
How is gDocs more vendor locked than Office?

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

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

------
known
Discussed in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563009)

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

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hennsen
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
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.

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illlogic2
Honest question, can you just run simple symmetric encryption on your data
before uploading to gapps?

~~~
juliangoldsmith
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.

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

------
jdanielricher
just use graphitedocs.com

------
nkkollaw
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.

