I’ve been testing it and it seems like a good solution for general productivity and a great option for people migrating from MS. It’s open source and cross-platform, but I just don’t see it in any conversations about office software.
For me, it’s so far leagues beyond LibreOffice. I really need something that works on my phone and syncs across devices, and allows collaboration. OnlyOffice seems to fit the bill. It’s also far more intuitive to my preferences.
I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.
It’s developed by a Russian owned company (Ascensio System SIA).
This is a moot point for me, same as “It’s developed by China!”
Remove networking permissions from the Flatpak, run it in Firejail, hell, could even put it into a container if you really wanted to be sure.
That’s very interesting. There’s a widespread boycott of any product with Israeli ties due to what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza, yet what Russia is doing is even more clear cut but this doesn’t register as a problem for most people here.
You couldn’t get more “clear cut” than what Israel is doing. It’s also a matter of degree. Invading another country is bad, but it is not a holocaust.
Besides, boycotting Russian products makes no sense in the West given that they are already sanctioned to hell. You’d have to go out of your way to send them money.
Comments like this are interesting because the upvote ratio tells me that 3/30 lemmy accounts are surely Russia controlled 🤘
If your expert analysis of voting ratios has led you to conclude that I’m Russian, you might want to go back on your methodology and rethink it. Check my post history and really give it a thought haha.
My hot take: of it’s open source and they don’t receive money from me, I don’t really care.
Until you work with anything that might be of interest to Russian services (Ukrainian refugees in EU in my case).
On their page it says: "## Ascensio System SIA - home of the ONLYOFFICE
ONLYOFFICE is a project developed by experienced IT experts from Ascensio System SIA, leading IT company with headquarters in Riga, Latvia. Originally ONLYOFFICE was designed for internal team collaboration.
An attempt to introduce it to a wider audience proved to be successful: ONLYOFFICE received very positive feedback from the Internet community. As a result, its functionality was considerably revised and expanded that brought about a high and stable growth of users from different countries.
Nowadays, ONLYOFFICE is an international, open source project with employees and contributors in more than 30 countries. The holding company in Singapore unites our offices around the world under the ONLYOFFICE brand. For now, we have departments in Riga, Singapore, London, Dallas, Belgrade, Yerevan and Tashkent. Would like to join our big open source family? Check how to become a contributor or discover job openings."
https://www.onlyoffice.com/about.aspx
Hmm…you seem to be at least partially right.
“In 2009, a group of software developers from Ascensio System SIA (Latvian-based) and New Communication Technologies (Russian-based) launched a project called TeamLab, a platform for internal team collaboration.[32]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnlyOffice
the app version also has facebook & google trackers embedded into it:
https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.onlyoffice.documents/latest/#trackers
they’re trying harder to hide that now. as of last year, a sg-based holding company owns a uk-based company which owns the original developer, the software, and numerous regional branch offices.
kinda sucks, because it is a nice program. doesn’t have feature parity with microsoft office, but it’s got pretty much everything that most users need or would want. it’s also horribly slow on lower-spec hardware.
Back in the day it was just OpenOffice and LibreOffice. When did OnlyOffice come out? And, more importantly, did they call it that after OnlyFans became famous for some reason?
Edit: have done some googling and I thibk personally I’ll be sticking with Libreoffice. I can see the utility for Windows folks making a switch but I often find open source tools which do not try to copy the proprietary alternative. Some of the best FOSS like Krita were successful because they broke the mold of slavishly copying UX and tools from bigger companies. Ditto with Godot to an extent.
Btw it was indeed called OnlyOffice after OF had taken off. Their name change was in 2022. Maybe I can sub to clippy and get him to uncurl! FOSS projects are so bad with naming and logos.
I have the same feeling
I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.
A point about conversations, rather than the software itself. I think it’s not really at the forefront of the discussion because this kind of software caters kinda to “legacy” organizational environments that want a 1 to 1 replacement for Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which is not the sexiest problem. In the community of adopters of NextCloud (poor souls…) the discussion between onlyoffice and collabora, together with their integration with NC, is a quite common topic but again, most of these deal with orgs and not individual adoption and I would say that’s a very distinct crowd from most “hackerinos” who populate the FOSS online communities.
That said, a lot of the discourse is now focused on moving away entirely from document-based (and even document-oriented) software, because there’s a shared understanding that the problem is in the approach itself, and what IBM, Apple and Microsoft considered a reasonable way to handle information in the '80s, is not necessarily the best way now.
Can you expand on your last point? Where do we move to from document based software? That seems like a bigger change than the change from typewriter to word processor.
Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.
I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it’s clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.
Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g
I’ll also toss out Zettlr, which is ideal for technical/scientific writing and publishing. Massive displacement in the scientific/technical community pushing out the incumbent Google, Microsoft, and (gasp) raw LaTeX.
It’s similar to only fans but instead of naked people you watch pros do excel
