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France's homegrown open source online office suite

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Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: why do you consider it to be nowhere near an "Office suite"? It seems to me it fits the definition given by Wikipedia [1]. I guess it is less advanced than Google Workspace or Microsoft Office but it would cover all of my needs at work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

Google Docs is a document editor (opening/saving Microsoft office compatible documents, with layout, etc), not a wiki/markdown editor. The La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence.

For layouts and opening docs from other suites, it seems they rely on OnlyOffice, as listed on the marketing page of their Google Drive equivalent [1]. OpenDesk from ZenDiS (German counterpart to this project, also collaborating on La Suite) seems to rely on Nextcloud and Collabora Online for that [2]. Collabora and OnlyOffice are also present in Lasuite Drive's development environment [3].

Docs and Drive aren't the only products in this suite: they also provide alternative for Meet, Chat, GMail or Sheets. I have no doubt that Microsoft and Google products offer more features but my point still stands: a lot of employees (like myself) need productivity tools but only need the core features.

[1] https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/produits/fichiers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDesk

[3] https://github.com/suitenumerique/drive/blob/46c9730d1b6d5c4...

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#213
post #14

Makes sense, using an office suite hosted by a hostile power isn't a very smart longterm strategy.

Wondering what software are China/Russia using in their public administration?

Local LibreOffice forks. And MS Office, of course.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#214
post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

You don't need to raise taxes for this, literally just stop wasting money on licensees once the open source projects are ready. It's not a "let do it in 3 months" thing, this will take at least a decade.

FramaSoft has been building "Dégooglisons" since 2001

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#215
post #53
post #26

Okay this is nowhere near an "Office suite". It is a cloud collaboration suite with a glorified markdown editor and with some extra utilities around. Almost nobody buys stuff like Google Docs and Microsoft Office for this reason. From my experience using open-source collaboration groupware like Nextcloud, their solutions written in dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python are always woefully slow. Only thing…

To make matters worse, they are using Django. I can't take the EU serious any more.

Read this (among other articles on the same subject): https://medium.com/@tk512/django-scales-stop-blaming-the-fra...

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#216
Honest question…given how developed our sensibilities are around docs, file storage, and spreadsheets, what is the hard part to this?

Don’t get me wrong…something is hard…I still use Microsoft Word because I feel like I have to. But what is keeping the industry from building a word processor that doesn’t suck and is capable of interfacing with .docx files?

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#217
post #71

On this topic, I think it is worth mentioning Framasoft [1] It is a French organization that offers plenty of alternatives to Google and other big tech products. A lot of them are just rebranded and hosted open source software, but they also develop their own, such as PeerTube and Framaprout (the last one is a joke, but PeerTube isn't). [1] https://framasoft.org/

Yup, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned earlier but they're the ones behind PeerTube (which I see posted on HN a lot) and many other tools. They've been building google alternatives for over two decades now and many of their tools are quite mature

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they…

A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of…

[deleted]

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#219

I was looking at the Meet repository as an example, people literally don't know how to write React, without drowning in `useEffect`, `eslint-disable`, `any`. React has it's issues (and a ton of them), but writing code like this, I expect it to end up exactly like Microsoft Teams quality wise. Honestly, at that point, it's indistinguishable from LLM slop

Why would one decide to even go with React in recent years anyway? Strangely I've seen it happen a lot too. I'd have thought that Vue or Svelte would be a slam dunk choice. Do project managers love bloat and lag or something?

I personally don't mind React, but I do acknowledge, after using it for a couple of years, that it seems to be a magnet for issues. It's the kind of framework, where if you're not writing properly, mostly like [Thinking in React](https://react.dev/learn/thinking-in-react) (with some caveat for niche performance optimizations), you're going to have a rough time, and you're going to make life miserable for anyone that does know what they're doing

It has a weird learning curve, where you can ship something somewhat working, fairly fast, but to write it properly, with no bugs, you need to understand a lot of niche React-specific things, and their solutions (and those solutions are never useEffect https://react.dev/learn/you-might-not-need-an-effect).

At that point, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't already experienced with React. It's been an uphill battle, trying to work with anyone that is using React, without understanding how to write properly.

Re: France's homegrown open source online office suite

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfa…

cracks fingers The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick. "The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth." Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing. Exponential curves + limit…

> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"

But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)

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