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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I do like this news, but I wonder why they choose LibreOffice. It's the most widely known MS alternative, but things like OnlyOffice [0] and Nextcloud Office [1] (which is based on Collabora Online [2], which in turn is based on LibreOffice) offer much more compelling collaborative features, imho. Just plain office (like it's 1997) is quite a step back, no?

Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs. I think document interoperability (as in: Looks similar) is also better.

[0] https://www.onlyoffice.com/

[1] https://nextcloud.com/office/

[2] https://www.collaboraonline.com/

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OnlyOffice had some controversy around being owned and operated by a Russian company through shell companies. They might even fall under EU sanctions. There is an open German information request to the government that was never answered.

Wether those connections are true or not I can't say, but I do know people that dropped OnlyOffice in their evaluations for this reason.

> They might even fall under EU sanctions.

They FALL under EU sanctions.

https://www.tu.berlin/en/campusmanagement/news-details/umste...

That's "just" the interpretation of TU Berlin. Here is the FOI request that was never answered: https://fragdenstaat.de/anfrage/onlyoffice-sanktionen/

Just to be clear: TU Berlin is probably right. But according to some sources (which I don't believe) OnlyOffice no longer has any connections to Russia and is now really from an EU company.

I checked it, but at $149 per year for the home server (and don't forget to click in the 'information' button on the 'Lifetime' License Duration option), there seems to be a bit of a premium on that MS styling, considering the functionality in competing F/OSS suites.

> Especially OnlyOffice looks extremely similar to MS Office, I have it on all our Linux laptops at home so the kids don't feel much difference between home and school envs.

This is how you make them dependent on a single MS-like interface. Kids are the most flexible, and shouldn't need. Would go as far as to say they are mildly harmed by not being exposed to different workflows.

Sure glad no one paved Windows over our Macs and Amigas so we wouldn't have to learn anything else.

OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise offering that does also cost money.

Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free & libre.

True.

But I have to say that I got quite used to collaborative editing, not something I'd like to give up.

People can get used to buttons moving to other places (imo), but collecting and integrating edits from multiple people via email is not something I look back at fondly.

Yeah, then again most people haven't experienced this and are happy to just enable "track changes" in Word and send the document back and forth, maybe if you're lucky, it's hosted on SharePoint or OneDrive.

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