My first gut reaction was “Neat, but no thank you” but the more I think about how many clients COULD be using a cloud hosted privacy respecting platform instead of 365, I quickly bit my lip.
LibreOffice Online, a self-hostable libre office environment, is coming back!
Submitted 2 weeks ago by FirmDistribution@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/02/24/libreoffice-online-a-fresh-start/
Comments
Reygle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They say in their post that they won’t host it.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
(IMO) even better.
Give me the package to self-host it.Reygle@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yes that’s understood and particularly great, leaving orgs/people to self host. I’m all for it.
unmagical@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
I hope they’re able to move toward a client first renderer instead of the image tile approach they used previously. That was kinda a network hog and cludgy to use.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Yes please.
I’d love libreoffice in a browser, but the way collabora achieves it is abysmal.
fizzle@quokk.au 2 weeks ago
The screen caps on the original project page seem to imply a proper web ui:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/
Hard to be sure but the menu bar doesn’t look like the native menu.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
OMG YES!!!
This makes me really happy because it’ll make collaborating with friends on things a lot easier.
conorab@lemmy.conorab.com 2 weeks ago
Fingers crossed this can be a viable replacement for Collabora Online with Nextcloud, which has been a nightmare.
gabmus@retrolemmy.com 2 weeks ago
has it been a nightmare? I’m genuinely asking because I have it set up (with nextcloud master container) and although I don’t use it very often, the times I do it seems quite alright
conorab@lemmy.conorab.com 2 weeks ago
I recall spreadsheets being particularly painful on mobile when I’d try to select multiple rows and it would select way more at a time but would need to fouble-check that or find a screen recording if I made one at the time.
The main issues is there was a bug where if there is an open session for a document in Collabora (including dead sessions say from mobile) and that Collabora server is shut down in the wrong order, then all changes including if you click “Save” will be lost. A bug was opened for this and closed by making sure the servers shut down in the correct order, but I don’t know if that fixes cases where the servers a hard shutdown.
user224@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
I was just looking if something like that exists yesterday, but got disappointed. Nice timing.
blah3166@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Check out CryptPad.org, it’s:
- Open Source; so it can’t be taken away from you should the org cease to exist.
- Self-hostable; although you can use or pay to use other people’s instances.
- Collaborative; with real-time editing like Google docs
- Federated; so you can collaborate with others whether you’re using a self-hosted instance or using any other server.
- End-to-end encrypted: The server admins can’t see any of your data.
Only downsides so far is that the UX is a bit slow when first loading documents and there are no mobile apps.
dhruv3006@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This one is pretty great!
vogi@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Love Cryptpad, but am I the only one for whom the loading indicator gives a bad flashback to early js framework web development where every website was 16 times the initial load time, 4 times the overall size and just more buggy. Website SPA or not have rarely a good reason to have a loading indicator for the initial load the browser already does that.
jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Wth, I never knew Cryptpad does sheets/forms, that’s so cool!
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
fuck yeah. I’ll happily deploy this to my stack.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As someone who is slowly moving off big tech, are there plugins or themes for these office suites that bring then more in line with modern UIs for office suites.
I hate Msoft and Google but the gsuite has a nice clean set up. Microsoft less so but still doesnt feel as unwieldly as open office. I was doing a doc last night and ended up getting the chrome flatpak and signing into docs.
kossa@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Open Office =/= Libre Office
The latter is a long standing fork of the former and considered the “FLOSS standard office suite”. It has a “modern” ribbon UI, but you have to set it like that, it usually comes with the “old layout” by default.
OnlyOffice is another office suite which brings a ribbon UI by default.
While not open source Softmaker Office mimics Microsoft Office the closest (and claims the best available MS file format compatibility, but I cannot say anything about that).
domi@lemmy.secnd.me 2 weeks ago
If we’re talking about online editing, Collabora has web editors based on LibreOffice but with a modern UI: www.collaboraonline.com
They are really great and can be self hosted (e.g. with Nextcloud).
For offline editing, as already mentioned LibreOffice has an optional ribbon UI and OnlyOffice looks pretty modern as well.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
For a second I read OpenOffice instead of OnlyOffice and was perplexed how one would call that modern lmao
ilsimoneviaggiatore@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
Great!
I’d love to see libre office on my personal nextcloud instance. That would be an easy and effective “feature” for nextcloud which could be adopted by many business. They’re already running Nextcloud, maybe, for the digital sovereign.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts!
commander@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That’ll be nice to see. I like Collabora but haven’t tried hosting it. Opening that up and LibreOffice up side by side with the tabbed interface, barely any different. Maybe LibreOffice exposes way more buttons in each tab so maybe more intimidating but it looks pretty good compared to what I remember when the tabbed interface was first made available. Looking forward to seeing this progress
UltraBlack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Wasn’t collabora trying to be this
pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Why everything is going to be browser based?
3abas@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Because you can use it on any device without having to install the whole app and sync the data separately… It’s super convenient, and cross-platform.
It’s still self hosted and you own the data.
luftruessel@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
That’s one thing I really love about the whole self hosting deal. I find more and more apps that I can run on my server und just utilize it on all my hardware. Only have your phone on you? No problem. Working on your companies computer? Just open the browser No reason to install and maintain stuff on 4 different devices
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
yep… I write all my papers in Google because I can access the files anywhere, and nothing beats PaperPile for referencing yet.
muxika@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I thought tools like OnlyOffice filled in that gap. Nice to see an alternative.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
People seem to be doling out some hate for OnlyOffice because of its compatibility with MSOffice formats.
I maybe reporting it wrong. I just didn’t get it at the time, either.
digger@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Back in 2020, those of us who had been using the OnlyOffice community document server were greeted with a notification stating that mobile editing was no longer supported and that we’d have to buy their commercial product.
Some folks quickly figured out a patch. Others, like myself, left with a bad taste in our mouths.
hanrahan@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I think it has to do with a recent decision by OO to default save all files in MS format vs an open format ? I saw some post about it on Mastodon. I use LO
tenebrisnox@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
I think Libre Office is fantastic and I’m glad to see the back of Microsoft. But I miss how useful mail-merge was and how limited it is in Libre. It’s my only small complaint among so many cheers for Libre.
titey@jlai.lu 2 weeks ago
Awesome! 😁
ulterno@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
This should open it to being used collaboratively.
Then I can convince wherever I work, to use this instead of going with other MS stuff?ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How long until someone uses a LibreOffice Online instance to drop a Google doc on someone?
Cyber@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Some new EU funding in the background?
filcuk@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
For personal use, being able to replace microsoft/google offerings with little to no functionality loss is amazing