ooooh I love this. Proton is just winning constantly these days.
Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor
Submitted 4 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://proton.me/blog/docs-proton-drive
Comments
Nima@leminal.space 4 months ago
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
No they’re not. They can’t even finish a single solution, let alone actually make anything functional when you’re not using their proprietary servers. They’re becoming Microsoft.
micka190@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They can’t finish a single solution
Gee, it’s almost as if that’s the whole point of an ever-evolving SaaS platform.
Cyberjin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
All Their services are online based right? I don’t understand why using their proprietary servers is an argument here.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Damn. Proton is doing a good job of stacking up W’s these days.
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They act just like Microsoft. Lot’s of people think Microsoft is successful. If you think Microsoft is the champion of privacy though you might be in a cult.
wagoner@infosec.pub 4 months ago
Comparing proton with Microsoft like this is a joke.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
I’ll tell you what. When proton ships a product that takes a screenshot of my desktop every 5 seconds and stores it in an unsecured DB any user on my computer can access, we’ll call them even.
Muscar@discuss.online 4 months ago
I’d almost believe you were paid to hate on proton, but you’d get fired for how fucking dumb your arguments are.
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
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.
ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world 4 months ago
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Fair enough! That’s exciting news
gnutard@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Well, he’s not wrong. It is ‘open-source’, not Free Software.
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
? It’s not open source, AFAIK.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Open source ? Does that mean I can host my own ? Would it be compatible with other self hosted instance ?
nek0d3r@lemmy.world 4 months ago
As I’ve slowly been expanding my homelab, NextCloud caught my attention. I haven’t tried it quite yet, but it might be closer to what you’re looking for.
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Thanks, I’ll have a look
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
If you do want to host your own google docs, look into Onlyoffice, or LibreOffice with Collabora
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
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.
tourist@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.
mutant_zz@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.
If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.
bzah@discuss.tchncs.de [bot] 4 months ago
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.
ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
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.
ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
It…was intended for those things. Excel is modern business’ multi-tool. You’re not going to excuse 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.
fluxc0@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Proton at this very moment
I CANT STOP WINNING!
bruhduh@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
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.
DesolateMood@lemm.ee 4 months ago
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
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If you were on Proton then you wouldn’t be able to sync your calendar & contacts and you’d have to share your private keys.
alansuspect@aussie.zone 4 months ago
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.
Blu@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
I did the same thing. The first privacy-oriented service I heard about is 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 have 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.
exanime@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Just signed up today for the family plan in my ongoing degoogling process
It’s a bit pricey but so far loving it. Specially Proton Pass, coming from bitwarden (which I liked), it’s nicer and faster, much faster
BenPranklin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Proton has been great for degoogling but don’t put all your eggs in one basket again, that’s what makes degoogling a difficult thing. There’s several proton services I intentionally avoid just so if for some unforseen reason they start being shitty in 5 years I don’t have to uproot my entire digital life to leave them.
ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Maps is what makes degoogling hard ;p
Everything else is pretty straightforward.
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And so what happens to your passwords if Proton were to go offline and you needed to continue using Proton Pass? Do they have an open source server you can use like Bitwarden does or vaultwarden? Or are you essentially locking yourself into a new walled garden for no reason other than name recognition? Why not just use KeePassXC which is encrypted locally rather than share your password with a third party who can easily capture your private key password?
nutsack@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I think a lot of these cloud-based passwords saves will have a local database that syncs with the cloud. I think you can unlock them and access your passwords without internet access
Alk@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Because of their integration with simplelogin.
Manalith@midwest.social 4 months ago
My only gripe with Proton Pass so far is that I’m used to Bitwarden’s right-click autofill menu and some sites’ 2FA codes don’t automatically pop up for some reason.
ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Does pass support custom url filters yet? I self host and so I have a lot of 192.168 bookmarks…when I tried pass it had no way to organize them by url prefix (port number).
exanime@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Seems to work fine on my web front to deluge
exanime@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Good question, don’t know.
I’ll check it out and report back
zer0squar3d@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
Unfortunately it doesn’t yet. Having same issue.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 4 months ago
A lot of people confuse open source with community driven/governed.
If things go awry, you’ll be locked-in, married to Proton.asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 4 months ago
How do you mean? You’d just export your data.
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They’re just too expensive. Like, sure, it costs money to run, but 3.49€/month (the discounted 24 month rate) for the mail only plan, 15 GB storage. (41.88€, $45.17 USD, $67.28 AUD per year)
That’s really expensive if you just want mail.
The other stuff, is also really expensive. To the point that makes you think, “there is no way google is making THIS much to make up the difference in advertising to me for a comparable plan”.
aquafunk@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.
then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data
it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental
menemen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If you just need an email account I’d suggest to have a look at posteo.de. I am with them for many years now. Price is good and terms also.
ruse8145@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
Switched to them last year after a 2-year of proton precisely because the revised proton plans were weird and because id heard a lot of negative stories about getting locked out. Ironically I almost just went thru the lockout process but thankfully the email support guy was able to get things sorted.
Tbh I miss nothing and since I use simple login or anonaddy for most misc things, switching was easy. My proton account is de facto dead…I wouldn’t refuse to return, but I’m really just an a la carte guy.
macgyver@federation.red 4 months ago
You get mailserver capabilities with that tier as well though. You shouldn’t be using the plus plan unless you need the email storage or host custom domains and don’t want to deal with the admin.
nieminen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
To be fair, it’s not as clear as it could be that there are other “plus” plans. If you happen to land on the proton mail page when looking, they only show you the mail plus option (and unlimited). And even then really truncate what exactly you get for each paid option. There’s a page that I was only able to find after opening my free account (it exists when not logged in, just never found it) that explains in depth all the options and differences.
Annoyingly, most of the individual upgrade pages don’t give the 2 year purchase option either.
gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com 4 months ago
wake me when we can use them as a saml provider
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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.
gccalvin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I know there are different use cases for each, but generally do people prefer self hosted nextcloud, proton docs, or libre office?
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 4 months ago
Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. Collabora is basically a VNC session over LibreOffice. While OnlyOffice is web-native and has much better compatibility.
Lem453@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
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.
variants@possumpat.io 4 months ago
probably depends what youre into, I have my own home lab so I setup nextcloud with collabora for my personal stuff
Napain@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
notice the lack of the word ‘free’
ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social 4 months ago
Google Docs is free because they use your data for advertising and AI training.
Cyberjin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
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)_/¯
Muscar@discuss.online 4 months ago
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.
bquintb@midwest.social 4 months ago
Awesome…I can move my budget over to my proton.me account now.
nieminen@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I don’t think there’s a spreadsheet app yet. Hopefully soon
Squizzy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Great, hopefully it is as useful. Surveys and such are a must for any migration.
fin@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Are they trying to become Google alternative?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 months ago
Only if they start shutting all their services down if they don’t become the world leader within the first 3 years.
praise_idleness@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Finally. This and decent photo app is what Proton needed. Hoping they would keep going on this path
spiderman@ani.social 4 months ago
It’s all good but I wish they increase the storage for free tier a bit more
DictatorGator@feddit.de 4 months ago
Is this meant as a Proton Notes equivalent ?
Bali@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Interesting. I will try to find out if it’s 1:1 in handling .docx like OnlyOffice which i hope it is. It sucks that OnlyOffice won’t run natively on Wayland.
Hyphlosion@donphan.social 4 months ago
I’m only interested if they bought back my beloved Lynx the Office Assistant.
Jarmer@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
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.
not_so_handsome_jack@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
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.
timewarp@lemmy.world 4 months ago
How is it private?
micka190@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Literally the second paragraph of the post (but I’m sure you haven’t read it, since you seem so busy replying to every comment here about how Proton is becoming Microsoft or something).
cygnus@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
I don’t see anything different… How did you access it?
illi@lemm.ee 4 months ago
From what I read it’s being released to users gradually I think?
hanke@feddit.nu 4 months ago
It’s rolling out slowly. I got access to it yesterday :)