I’ve been testing it and it seems like a good solution for general productivity and a great option for people migrating from MS. It’s open source and cross-platform, but I just don’t see it in any conversations about office software.
For me, it’s so far leagues beyond LibreOffice. I really need something that works on my phone and syncs across devices, and allows collaboration. OnlyOffice seems to fit the bill. It’s also far more intuitive to my preferences.
I am sure that some people wouldn’t like the fact that the interface runs as a webapp, or use of Java, but it’s strange to me that it’s not usually even in the conversation.
A point about conversations, rather than the software itself. I think it’s not really at the forefront of the discussion because this kind of software caters kinda to “legacy” organizational environments that want a 1 to 1 replacement for Google Docs or Microsoft 365, which is not the sexiest problem. In the community of adopters of NextCloud (poor souls…) the discussion between onlyoffice and collabora, together with their integration with NC, is a quite common topic but again, most of these deal with orgs and not individual adoption and I would say that’s a very distinct crowd from most “hackerinos” who populate the FOSS online communities.
That said, a lot of the discourse is now focused on moving away entirely from document-based (and even document-oriented) software, because there’s a shared understanding that the problem is in the approach itself, and what IBM, Apple and Microsoft considered a reasonable way to handle information in the '80s, is not necessarily the best way now.
Can you expand on your last point? Where do we move to from document based software? That seems like a bigger change than the change from typewriter to word processor.
Well, Obsidian, Notion, Anytype, Affine can give you a hint of possible directions in this transition. While they still retain document-oriented features, like the concept of Page, they also try to really go for a much richer experience that does away with the limitations inherited from paper-based solutions. Double-linking, composability, fractal properties of pages and nesting (especially in Notion and Anytype), block-based UI, seamless integration of text, databases, and embeds, heavy use of transclusion and other stuff like that.
I would say this alternative system is far from cohesive and mature, but it’s clear some software is emancipating itself from whatever Onlyoffice represents.
Maybe you would find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXiQlLHuK7g
Cool thanks. I get the distinction now. I use Joplin for some of the features mentioned and do like it. Notion sounds pretty neat too.
I’ll also toss out Zettlr, which is ideal for technical/scientific writing and publishing. Massive displacement in the scientific/technical community pushing out the incumbent Google, Microsoft, and (gasp) raw LaTeX.
Glancing through zettlr’s website and docs, Im not sure I understand it. Is it just notetaking software, that utilizes pandoc to build professional documents (via pdflatex)? Whats an example use case?
The general idea is that you use it to take notes on research papers or websites (optionally though it’s Zotero integration), then when the time comes to write a technical paper, you can research from the comfort of your Zettelkasten, directly cite the research you took notes on and automate proper citations with BibTex, write in raw markdown if preferred, create tables natively, embed charts and graphs directly and properly track them using figure notation, do full layout templates in LaTeX, support LaTeX math equations, and a lot more.
Basically it solves the fragmentation problem researchers have had for a long time by integrating all the standards instead of trying to centrally replace them or declare them unnecessary.