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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

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https://nextcloud.com/office/ seems to be exactly that.

Self hosting seems to consist of "set up nextcloud, set up collabora, click the integration button" https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-to-install-nextcloud-office/

Or just `sudo docker run --init --sig-proxy=false --name nextcloud-aio-mastercontainer --restart always --publish 80:80 --publish 8080:8080 --publish 8443:8443 --volume nextcloud_aio_mastercontainer:/mnt/docker-aio-config --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro ghcr.io/nextcloud-releases/all-in-one:latest` if you follow these instructions: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one

That’s not very secure, giving a :latest container access to the docker socket…

It's not if you're running it system that also runs other software. On a dedicated VM, I wouldn't care, though.

As for :latest, that depends on the push policy of the container owners. NextCloud only pushes stable releases to :latest so it's probably fine. There's no reason a :v123 tag would be any more or less secure than :latest.

It's only if you use the AIO package (=all in one). You can run it differently though.

I host a small server for family and it seems to work well:

https://hub.docker.com/r/collabora/code/

Is this light enough to run on a SBC (think of something with the power of a Raspberry Pi 3 or a bit more) with decent performance (for just 3-4 users)?

I was running it on an Odroid N2 for 2-3 years, and upgraded to a RK3588 Orange Pi something a couple of years ago. It's not fast but it's useable. At one point I succeded in making the collaborative editing working, but it stopped after updates. Maybe it needs more love than what I'm able to spare, but the feeling after years is that you have to accept some level of unreliability.

You can run Libreoffice on Nextcloud with online editing, such that two people can open a file and edit it at the same time.

>Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.

CryptPad just seems more secure compare to Nextcloud.

Why?

It has crypt in the name

CryptPad uses end-to-end encryption for all documents. It has a very different use case than other collaborative office suites. You can of course still use it as a replacement, but in my experience opening documents takes a bit of time.

have the russia-ties been debunked though?

apoligies, it was onlyoffice that is russian

I'm not sure about Nextcloud, but the French government built a thing that looks pretty good: https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/home/

If you want a full suite, the German government has been working on integrating and packaging a whole open source productivity stack: https://www.opendesk.eu/en

I applaud both efforts but openDesk is mainly aimed at governments and usually only implements 3rd party OSS.

Their file storage solution is Nextcloud, chat is element, etc.

I think it depends on the feature set you're looking for. My nextcloud instance is basically online OpenOffice apparently. It doesn't match Google Docs in speed, responsiveness, UI or UX, and it costs me like $18/month to run, but it seems relatively light-weight. There's no idiotic gemini crap or a pop-up begging me to try it though, and all my data is my own. I'm not the Austrian government but that's the feature set I was looking for.

Hetzner offer managed next cloud for 5 euro with 1tb storage. 13 euro for 5tb.

I started using this and overall quite good but with very minor caveats...

* My part of the world is not adjacent to Germany (where this paid offering is hosted)...so there is a little latency. But not nearly as bad as I expected.

* While file sharing and syncing and other basic stuff is included, the equivalent of online collabora (or whatever the online office suite is called) is not included and you would have to self host it...but hetzner state this in their relevant knowledge base webpages.

The current Google workspace service is about $7 a month. I'd pay more to be rid of AI, it's a near-constant nuisance, and major privacy concern. But $18 seems steep to also be missing core features.

$7 per user. So if you have three people using the server, it becomes cheaper.

I just want a OK spreadsheet experience I can use from the web, and host myself in my home. How does whatever Nextcloud offer for spreadsheets compare to Google Sheets?

Nextcloud editors use Collabora Online, which is apparently a fork/derivative of LibreOffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

As the other comment said, it's basically Libreoffice Calc, so try installing that on your laptop and see if you can get used to it.

My opinion: not as polished as Google Sheets, but good enough. However it's much better than the web version of excel.

Also, your experience will depend on the server your using to run it. Lots of people try to run Nextcloud on very weak hardware to save costs, and it does run well. But office in particular needs a bit more compute and memory to feel fast.

On the other hand, not depending on trans-ocean entity is feature Google Docs can't offer. And that one is high priority these days.

Collaborative editing is very niche, and I highly doubt it's used in government work.

>Collaborative editing is very niche

I assure you that it is not. Every organization, public and private, beyond a certain size, has people whose entire day consists of collaboratively editing documents and spreadsheets. Responding to superiors who highlight a sentence and leave comments like "@Team can we tighten this up? Thx".

As we digitize everything at work, people has done that less and less. That looks like an immediate collateral effect of paper or people that think like they are using paper.

There is still your random "let's make a list of X on the meeting", that would actually improve if you just had something that collects the items. But out of that, there has been a long time since I last saw people doing it.

Very niche? That depends a lot on the culture (I use that daily).

I mean, has Microsoft? Last two places I've worked at are in the Office ecosystem and it's incredibly bad. I need to reconcile documents all the time like it's 2005, sharing takes 15 clicks (which is why it's a massive pain to get Sharepoint AI ready, since everyone just shares with all rather than specifying with who to specifically).

With AGI supposedly around the corner and (more realistically) current LLMs performing at least incrementally better -- why are we even thinking that Microsoft's or Google's solutions will provide enough value vs competitors in 3, 5 or 10 years? Cheaper or free alternatives might soon reach feature parity, and even previously complicated deployment is now aided by AI.

No one cares

Multiple years of AGI around the corner and still no demonstrated improvement in submissions to FOSS projects. If anything it's slowed them down by wasting maintainer time reviewing slop.

Thats a skill issue. Maintainers can get through a whole lot more than ever before because they can review PR much faster. Thats great for velocity. Features still need that expert touch since no software system is simple but it is getting easier.

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