Is there an open-source/not corporate-owned alternative for Google Docs?

hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 46 points –

I have been thinking about moving my writing projects somewhere else, but I don't know any decent alternatives that would let me format the text properly and such.

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If you are tech-y, Nexcloud with Libreoffice or Only Office or Colabara Office are good options. You can mess around and see what works well for you. I don't know if this is universal and happens to everyone, but immediately upon finishing my first Nextcloud server, I wiped it and did it all again with my favorite settings/options.

Just be sure to backup to a few different places in case you mess something up. Taking disk snapshots can also help you roll back any screw-ups.

Overleaf.com, but not really, because it's LaTeX

As a different, more techy, solution that can work depending on the people you collaborate with, is to use a hosted Git service for collaboration (if you want to stay completely open source, a self-hosted GitLab).

Then, change your publication workflow to write in Markdown, ReST, or one of the other ascii formats that previews correctly, and set up your CI to render the documents automatically into, e.g., pdf:s using a converter. There are all kinds of converters from Markdown/ReST -> docs, presentation, etc. formats that are as competent - if not more so - than the usual office suites. This setup offers both online editing in the GitLab instance and offline by local cloning of the Git repo.

The side effect is that this system very seriously records and preserve your document history. You can see exactly who, at what point, changed, added, and removed things. For some types of documents, this can be very important.

If you join tilde.team you will get free access to their nextcloud services

LibreOffice is more active, that's also what is usually shipped with Linux desktop distros.

True, but it does not run as a document server, so you can't Selfhost it and connect it with you next loud instance to gain a cloud based office application.

That's as far as I know, would be cool if that was possible.

Isn't collabora just libreoffice under the hood? And nextcloud office is branded collabora I believe.

Well there are some that offer libreoffice or only via the cloud. but that is a company offering a service. if you don't want to pay anyone anything then you can turn your pc into a nextcloud server and host libre or only office that way.

Infomaniak's office suite for kDrive uses onlyoffice and I quite like it. Plus it's encrypted.