Pretty good project, but is it the future to have mainly web apps?
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Please develop this self hosted version using sandstorm
It makes hosting a breeze with one click installation
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.
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
What was wrong with libre?
The web browser is the future, especially for a crappy document editor and spread sheet.
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.
Surprised they didn't go with cryptpad - aren't they already French?
Cryptpad is French, but they are using OnlyOffice, which is Russian.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Fuck :( Didn't know that... I got convinced by the company being supposedly Latvian.
Yes, that's excellent.. We need our own Google suite. Fingers crossed so that it may come eventually.
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.
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?
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 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.
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