notice the lack of the word ‘free’
Get started by creating a free Proton Drive account today (if you don’t already have one). We are rolling out Docs starting today, and the feature will be available to all users over the next couple of days.
You can use it for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
free as in freedom, doofus
Specify that, “free” means two things in English, otherwise use “libre”, which means freedom in Spanish and it’s sometimes used to refer to free or libre software.
You’re both as bad as each other
Most “free” things aren’t free, you pay by them collecting your information and selling it. Anyone that automatically thinks something is bad because it isn’t free is dumb as fuck.
free as in freedom, doofus
Google Docs is free because they use your data for advertising and AI training.
Proton at this very moment
I CANT STOP WINNING!
I know there are different use cases for each, but generally do people prefer self hosted nextcloud, proton docs, or libre office?
Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. Collabora is basically a VNC session over LibreOffice. While OnlyOffice is web-native and has much better compatibility.
FWIW collabora and open office can integrate with other clouds like Seafile and owncloud Infinite scale. So even without NextCloud it can be used. It can also be used stand alone.
Doesn’t appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.
If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.
A lot of people confuse open source with community driven/governed.
If things go awry, you’ll be locked-in, married to Proton.Awesome…I can move my budget over to my proton.me account now.
Are they trying to become Google alternative?
Only if they start shutting all their services down if they don’t become the world leader within the first 3 years.
Great, hopefully it is as useful. Surveys and such are a must for any migration.
ooooh I love this. Proton is just winning constantly these days.
I like how there seems to be more and more alternatives to MS Office, even from big companies like Google. Best case scenario, this could lead to companies actually starting to use an open format, like ODF, so that all these different office applications can be used without causing issues in the file and that would pave the way for open source alternatives, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, to become viable alternatives for a lot more people and companies. Do Google Docs and Proton Drive use/support ODF? I’m pretty sure MS Office supports it.
I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death
Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked
Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it’s being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it
More commonly, I’ve had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It’s just hell.
It’s criminal that Microsoft has such a monopoly on word processing, they can’t even render text properly. It’s not an issue in Mac or Linux, but it is in all windows applications that aren’t using a chromium base.
Employer: Print out this .doc and bring it to work. Me, with a Mac: alright, here you go. Employer: why did you print it like this? Me: that’s what you sent me.
Uses compute platform that’s spent (all of personal computer history) trying to exclude any outsiders from working with them, a design intention of Steve Jobs from day one leading to significant waste and suffering for the past 50 years.
Sad that Microsoft doesn’t care
At least Linux has a leg to stand on. The culture can be exhausting but is generally in the right.
Life sure is terrible when people enjoy things you don’t, isn’t it?
No idea what your point is. Are you arguing the history of apple as a morally depraved company?
Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand… And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.
Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.
You use what ya got, and you don’t buy database software or hire a database guy until you know you need one
Probably true for most companies but I worked at one that had plenty of DB servers and developers, even developed their own database tech. Still, Excelitis as we called it was rampant.
Nothings more permanent than a temporary solution.
It…was intended for those things. Excel is modern business’ multi-tool. You’re not going to excise it until there is a solution for the HR person to do basic bulk data processing, basic Excel programming without having to acknowledge they are doing programming, etc.
The other path is better spreadsheet software, but let’s be honest most of the others are poor clones. Gsheets are nearly useless, only office is solid but…well, it’s just Excel but free. Open office is Excel millennium edition and libre while better than open, and has a few nice quality of life improvements, it’s still Excel.
fair enough
I feel you on that first part, I always use Markdown nowadays when I don’t have to use Word (or LibreOffice Writer in my case), I even use Marp to make presentations with Markdown. Since there’s no dragging stuff around and eyeballing if it’s actually coherent, it’s much quicker, the layout is always perfect and changing the layout doesn’t fuck up the entire slide/document.
Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.
By default?
No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf…
When I was degoogling a couple years ago I had a heck of a time choosing between protonmail and fastmail.
I went with the fastmail and, while I have no complaints, I’m starting to glance at greener grass.
I degoogled to Proton mail initially. I didn’t like that I couldn’t search my emails (a security thing or something? But annoying) and then their Drive was absolutely useless on macos. I had about 100gb and it couldn’t sync even half of it.
After much help from support I eventually moved away to a combo of Fastmail, Mega and OnlyOffice.
I did the same thing. The first privacy-oriented service I heard about was Proton. And, to be fair, they’re quite good. But the email search issues and struggles I had with their bridge eventually turned me off.
I left for mailbox(.)org and haven’t looked back. It’s great Proton has so many cool services, but the last thing I want is to get dependent on one company again, not after how hard it was to get away from Google.
I love Proton and will advocate for it any chance I get, but I can also see that it might be good to have people like you who don’t put all their eggs in one basket
Damn. Proton is doing a good job of stacking up W’s these days.
The only open source mentioned in the post is their encryption. Not the document editing software. OP please remove your change to the article title, it’s extremely misleading.
Fair enough! That’s exciting news
Well, they’re not wrong. It is ‘open-source’, not Free Software.
? It’s not open source, AFAIK.
Just tried it out with my proton account. Looks great! It’s very simple, but I also like that about it. And of course being private is wonderful.
I don’t see anything different… How did you access it?
From what I read it’s being released to users gradually I think?
Simplicity is an underrated feature. I’m really excited to see this come out because I’m becoming a bigger fan of proton every day.
Open source ? Does that mean I can host my own ? Would it be compatible with other self hosted instance ?
EDIT: the only source code I found hasn’t been maintained for 3 years.
If you do want to host your own google docs, look into Onlyoffice, or LibreOffice with Collabora
