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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that I'm advocating one) would make the product unusable five years down the road.

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There's definitely a market for self-hosting as in the case of Nextcloud, for example. There are lots of reasons companies, much less governments, may not feel comfortable using Google or Microsoft SaaS offerings.

But, as you say, that's different from running a local application. While some heavy-duty multimedia still benefits from running an app locally, that ship has mostly sailed with office suite software. I still have LibreOffice installed on most of my systems, but even if I'm not collaborating on a document, it's incredibly useful to have docs that are "just there" and I can access from any device--even including my phone in a pinch.

They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

It's a spinoff

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

The former LibreOffice development team from SUSE joined Collabora in September 2013 forming the subsidiary Collabora Productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

Yes, unfortunately. Makes impossible to work under unstable connections.

I hope Webasm enable porting at least some of the rendering code to client-side in the future.

Why not just use a desktop program with online features, then?

I'd assume that's less of a "chose" and more of technical limitation caused by wanting to reuse all the legacy code.

It's there but with the clear and explicit intention that the free version will lag behind the commercial offers.

I don't think making a web-based version would make sense for TDF. It would basically have to be done from scratch and OnlyOffice is already years ahead of them in that. Any attempt to port the existing code to the web also seems destined to fail (see Collabora).

What I think would really make LO stand out is strong collaboration support in the existing desktop editors. A self-hostable headless sync backend that streams real-time changes from and to everyone who has the document open would be even better than GDocs, which is notoriously slow due to being all in a browser.

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