Is this just for EU citisens or can Americans like me use it?
Foss, just deploy and enjoy
Don’t know what a Foss is
FOSS (free and open source software) is software that is completely open source and is free for everyone to use. It’s much harder to enshittify, and if it ever does people can fork (make a copy, and make their own changes to the software).
Free open source software
free and open source software
I was going to make a joke but honestly it’s refreshing and a good sign that Lemmy is starting to get used by people who don’t know what FOSS means now. Welcome.
Nice to see Lemmy is not just a place for complete nerds!
FOSS is free and open-source software. In simple terms, it is any program for which the source code (i.e. the actual code that forms the program, its entire backbone) is available for anyone to see and modify as they see fit, without any technical or legal limitations.
This is normally seen as very positive, because everyone with the knowledge of respective programming languages can inspect the program to see it doesn’t do anything malicious, and everyone can change the program to their needs. Also, the original creator of the program does not have power to put any limitations on its use, like introducing payment requirements, or deleting important features, because everyone can immediately spawn a version of the program that doesn’t have these changes, while still having the rest.
So… how do I use it? I tried signing up on the site, but… it said something about an organization it was poorly transltaed from French to English, so I couldn’t tell what I was doing… I got as far as registering my current email address
It might be a bit early for you. It’s in a way like Lemmy, somebody has to put it on a server and let you use it.
It’s meant for government agencies to deploy and use (although anybody with some self hosting knowledge can do on their servers, including hobbiests and companies)
In case you didn’t understood by now, it’s free open source software
So how do I use it?
Here is a get started guide -> https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs?tab=readme-ov-file#getting-started-
We already have kDrive you get 1TB storage for only 2€ a month, it’s based in Switzerland
Is there an open source implementation of kDrive as well?
It is already open-source. All of the source code is on their github and, for docs, they use an implementation of onlyoffice very similar to the one in Nextcloud
Oh that is good to know then. At a cursory glance I only saw the clients’ software available as github repositories and the German and French wikipedia pages called it a proprietary service.
Where are you getting that pricing?
https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/myksuite
1.90€ per month for 1TB
Nice, DINUM is doing a lot so great to see go beyond with supra national collaboration!
I’m using NextCloud (Germany and international open source community) hosted on Webo (Slovenia) with data centers in Germany and Helsinki (so I bet on Hetzner). I’m happy with it but I’ll keep on eye on https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs
I’d be curious, they use Minio which puts S3 first. Does it mean Docs (the official instance) is relying on AWS?
If so IMHO that’s not a great default EU sovereignty.
I would assume (without having looked at the codebase) that if they use minio they are, by default, not reliant on AWS.
Minio is its own S3 implementation which can be self-hosted.
S3, being an AWS protocol originally has
AWSenvironment variables all over the place but that does not necessarily mean a reliance on the service. Rather, they rely on the protocol and you bring your own S3 endpoint I would assume. be that minio, hetzner or what have you.FWIW if others are curious https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs/issues/755 opened an issue
I thought that MinIO is a Open-Source S3 implementation, which you can just install on your own system. S3 is a “protocol” here IIUC.
Is your complaint that they are using the S3 protocol, because it was invented and is controlled by AWS?
Or that some services might use it without MinIO, directly on AWS?
and why so?
Living under a rock eh?
Yes, that’s excellent… We need our own Google suite. Fingers crossed so that it may come eventually.
What was wrong with libre?
The web browser is the future, especially for a crappy document editor and spread sheet.
Then just use Word online.
Not FOSS and probably not privacy friendly
Pretty sure Libre only does local document collaboration, having it online is helpful for teams far from each other or who simply don’t have the infrastructure for their own central server of this kind.
Well this has been running in our Nextcloud and works pretty well collaboratively :) https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online not sure how it scales, but definitely an alternative that can be built on
Thanks for this; I may use it to build out my NextCloud server. I’ve already used it to replace shared calendars and contacts.
If you’re using Nextcloud All In One then it’s easy to enable it in the AIO settings.
If you’re not, I suggest looking into it. It’s the new officially recommended way of installing and it’s been great.
Nextcloud has an export/import data function but at the time I did it I only had a few GB of data so not sure how well it scales.
I got a kick out of Google Docs alternative since it is trying to be AnyType, AFFiNE, AppFlowy, etc and none of those editors are stupid enough to claim to be Google Docs alternatives nor are they a bloated mess. Proof is in the pudding though… Try putting 1 inch margins on a page & add tab stops with this & printing it out where you get the same results… oh wait, you can’t… Cause it isn’t a Google Docs alternative.
None of those tools are editors, right? They all try to be a notion alternative, which is also not an editor. There is basically 0 focus on typesetting.
That is what I’m saying this editor is trying to be Notion, not Google Docs.
Google docs is trash.
That is fine to have that opinion but it is irrelevant to the discussion since no where did I praise Google Docs. I’m just explaining the difference between this & and editor that does descent typesetting.
And an editor that does a decent job is not google docs.
It is embarassing that MS has dominated this for more than 30 years and Google, despite its infinite wealth, hasn’t made a decent office app.
I wholeheartedly agree with this opinion. Google Docs has done very little to innovate. The fact that you’re still limited to like 6 built-in styles & lack of integrated syntax highlighting is ridiculous.
Google Docs has done very little to innovate.
The place where I see Google Docs being far superior to any other product I’ve run into is collaborative work. Having multiple people writing in the same doc at the simultaneously is a train wreck in most products Office365 included. In other products there’s a good chance you’ll have a version conflict and someone’s changes will be lost. Google docs handles that with ease.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue. I first started in college in 2006 with Onenote and it worked well even then. googol is garbage.
I have been using collaboration with Microsoft products for decades with little issue.
You’ve had 60+ people all in a single Excel spreadsheet on Sharepoint all making changes at the exact same moment and never once had a issue of a document lock or file corruption? Its okay to have a preference for one product over the other, but when you’re blinded by brand loyalty where you can see no wrong with your preferred product, it makes you lose credibility.
I disagree. There’s Microsoft Office, and there’s everything else. Google is in that second bucket.
Depends on who you hang with. Pretty much all businesses at this point do collaboration either with Office 365 or with Google Docs, and the same in Academia. Usually it’s a mix of both.
There’s Libre office for those who like freedom and open source tech.
ZenDiS is awesome by the way.
Just checked the part about self-hosting. While it’s probably possible to handle things with a less heavy approach, their only “easy to use” example right now is to have a full-blown kubernetes cluster at hand or run locally in the source directory. That’s a bit much.
Please develop this self hosted version using sandstorm
It makes hosting a breeze with one click installation
In the README there’s also instructions for Docker Compose, although it’s quite the compose file, with SIXTEEN containers defined. Not something I’d want to self-host.
it seems to contains development containers and external services containers. So the compose file is more for local dev it seems
What i do find weird is the choice for Django for the backend. Python is incredibly slow, and django rest framework is even worse.
Honestly, k8s is super easy and very lightweight to run locally if you know the rights tools. There are a few good options but I prefer k3d. I can install Docker/k3d and also build a local cluster running in maybe 2 minutes. It’s excellent for local dev. Even good for production in some niche scenarios
k8s is overkill for a lot of homelabs. Using docker compose is a fraction of that complexity
Yes if single node, kinda if 2-3 nodes, no for anything above that IMHO.
Seconding k3d (and, by extension, k3s). If you’re in a market for sth suitable for more upstream-compliant clustering solution (k3s uses SQLite instead of etcd, iirc), RKE2 is also a great choice
I don’t like the approach of piling more things on top of even more things to achieve the same goal as the base, frankly speaking. A “local” kubernetes cluster serve no purpose other than incredible complexity for little to no gain over a mere docker-compose. And a small cluster would work equally well with docker swarm.
A service, even made of multiple parts, should always be described that way. It’s easy to move “up” the stack of complexity, if you so desire. Having “have a k8s cluster with helm” working as the base requirement sounds insane to me.
Yea I’m not a fan of helm either. In fact, I avoid charts when possible. But kustomize is great.
I feel the same way about docker compose. If it wasn’t already obvious, I’m biased in favor of k8s. I like and prefer that interface. But that’s just preference. If you like docker compose, great!
There’s one point where I do disagree however. There are scenarios where a local k8s cluster has a good and clear purpose. If your production environment runs on k8s, then it’s best to mirror that locally as much as possible. In fact, there are many apps that even require a k8s api to run. Plus, being able to destroy and rebuild your entire k8s cluster in 30s is wonderful for local testing.
Edit: typos
I won’t argue with the ups and downs of each technos, but I recently looked into docker swarms and it was all I expected kubernetes to be, without the hassle. And I could also get a full cluster with services restored from scratch in 30s. But I am obviously biased towards it, too :)
Honestly, a lot of the time I don’t understand why a lot of businesses use k8s.
At my company especially, we know almost exactly what our traffic will look like from 9am-5pm. We don’t really need flexible scaling, yet we still use it because the technology is hyped. Similar to cloud, we certainly don’t need to be spending as much as we do, but since everyone else is on or migrating to the cloud, we are as well.
The “problem” with k8s is not that it’s abstract-y (it’s not inherently any more abstract than docker), it’s that it’s very complex and enterprise-y.
The need for such a complex orchestration layer is not necessarily immediately obvious, until you’ve worked on a complex infra setup that wasn’t deployed with kubernetes. Believe me when you’ve seen the depths of hell that are hundreds of separately configured customer setups using thousands of lines of ansible playbooks, all using ad-hoc systems for creating containers/VMs, with even more ad-hoc and hacked together development and staging environments, suddenly k8s starts looking very appetizing. Instead of an abominable spaghetti of bash scripts, playbooks, and random documentation, one common (albeit complex) set of tools understood by every professional which manages your application deployment & configuration, redundancy, software upgrades, firewall configs, etc.
A small self-hosted production kubernetes cluster doesn’t have to be hard to operate or significantly more expensive than bare-metal; you can buy 3U of rack space, plop in 3 semi-large servers (think 128 GB plus a few TB of SSD RAID), install rancher and longhorn, and now you’ve got a prod cluster large enough for nearly every workload such that if you ever need to upgrade that means you have so many customers that hiring a k8s administrator will be a no-brainer.
Or you can buy minutes from AWS because CapEx is the absolute devil and instead you pay several times as much in OpEx to make it someone else’s problem. But if you’re doing that then you’re not comparing against “installing things the old-fashioned way”.
Thanks for the response!
I personally haven’t rolled a k8s or k3s cluster, so it’s always felt a bit abstract to me. I probably should though, to demystify it to myself in my work environment.
Complex is definitely what I have noticed when I see my devops team PR into the ingress directories.
I guess the abstract issue I see, that ties in to the meme i shared above, is that sometimes around deploys where we get blips of 503/4’s and we appear to be unable to track them down. Is it the load balancer? Ingress? Kong? The fact that there is so many layers make infra issues rough to debug
Kubernetes is not really meant primarily for scaling. Even kubernetes clusters require autoscaling groups on nodes to support it, for example, or horizontal pod autoscalers, but they are minor features.
The benefits are pooling computing resources and creating effectively a private cloud. Easy replication of applications in case of hardware failure. Single language to deploy applications, network controls, etc.
Really cool. I tried to sign up but you have to be part of an officially recognized organization in France and input their registration number as part of the process.
Yeah I thought this was open to the general public, I didn’t realize that it was not
I’m sure it will be. This is a government funded thing in the early stages so I can see how they would set it up that way.
I definitely don’t want the government attached to my personal files, in any country.
I love the docs ability to create databases from my docs. That would be super useful for work and research activities.
Oh, you mean a spreadsheet?
No, because with the above you can have rich objects in databases (for example, a dynamically updated list of medical events, each with all the attributes I want, attachments etc.), and almost arbitrarily deep nesting of databases. The idea to have databases with pages is one of the key features that made notion successful. It allows to structure knowledge without duplication, in addition to provide some other no-code features.
Spreadsheets are not even close.
Right up until you are doing compliance and governance and you realize docs are actually a terrible terrible source of truth for any automated systems. We’re 3 years into a project at a healthcare company to rip google sheets and docs out of our apps and replacing them with Postgres, bigquery, dbt and dagster.
It’s simply not okay to have your database be something anyone with write access to a doc can fuck up a formula by accident on. Your medical bills being maintained by random formulas on dozens of linked spreadsheets maintained by hand by random people on different teams is part of why they are impossible to unwind. By the time someone audits it, it’s printing different numbers than when your bill was rendered and it’s version control doesn’t work to roll it back without breaking dozens of other things.
I’m in the engineering business. We have a PDM system that we check-in copies of component 3D models, PDF drawings and DOCs. Once your team has collaborated enough, you have a copy…once a week/day/hour depending on your preference. That way you can collaborate and keep frozen records and rev controlled documents.
Right. But you can’t do that in a live system like google docs. You can have a workflow to export copies, but the live doc is the one bigquery and linked docs utilize to function against your app. It’s actually a feature of the same tooling that makes using them like a database possible that causes it to not be versionable. So even if you export copies as you update it, you can’t move the system back to those copies without breaking other parts of the system.
Other systems for modeling data have better version control for running parallel versions of models if you need to recover how data had been constructed in an older state. It’s an incredibly bad idea to do this with Google docs at scale
Pretty good project, but is it the future to have mainly web apps?
A bit of both I guess
Web apps have the advantage of not requiring admin permission and being accessible from pretty much everywhere, and they are often less intensive I believe
And I guess cloud storage of documents makes it even better
no office software requires admin eighter unless you want to install it for all users
I guess I don’t mind if I can self host the server. If I can’t I have no interest in touching it.
For sure! self hosting is the way
True: self hosting is beneficial, Foss office suite is great to empower us, users… etc.
The point of the software presented isn’t aimed at regular computer users that would enjoy a bit of independence, it looks more like something aimed at the enterprise administrative level that people may stumble upon while searching for a document (who needs versioning apart from filename extensions if you alone work on the documents).See it as: you may find , download and use updated packaged software on github but in reality it’s really a tool aimed at devs before being a software repository for end users.
I see this as software mainly for the French or German state administration being made public for others to enrich, integrate… Like Olvid is a matrix based E2E encrypted, real authenticated identity based messenger made available to the public once the French government financed it’s development for it’s own use.
Bro has been sleeping under a rock for the past 10 years.
For offline editing there’s already LibreOffice
LibreOffice does everything I need it to and there’s no need for anything else.
Doesn’t do collaborative online editing and that seems what this is about. But there are foss alternatives already, collabora/nextcloud, cryptpad etc.
It’s definitely been the direction of travel for the last several years. Not because the products are better, but because it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
it’s easier to develop for just the browser than for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
They also work on android and IOS. You are also not dependent on the different toolkits. Also it is so much more performant.
I’ve never found them to be more performant, and i can’t understand the logic of why a programme running inside another programme would be more performant except in comparison to unoptimised alternatives.
I’ve never used a web app that i thought was better than a local app. But i definitely understand why developers prefer them.
They also work on android and IOS.
I can imagine it’ll be a 160 MB app that loads the website in a webview, like it usually is
A good web app is awesome!
But the big ones usually wants to have a native app so that they can scan your whole computer and so on. This is good news.
which is fine if you deny network connections for it with a per-process firewall. but with a webapp you can never be sure that they won’t snatch your documents.
Now explain this to EU based corporations, which in my opinion needs to be the focus on making the change. They drive the economy. All major assets in software income are being routed to American firms through their licenses.
Yeah, it is called Word. Works on all computers, is free to use the web based version, and is the world standard.
Word won’t install on machine.
LibreOffice does, though.
Hey, this is a Python project, use underscores.
Maybe I missed something, but since when Word is not only an alternative to an office suite, but also a web-based one?
Office365 has had a web app version of word since 2011. So more than a decade.
But even a web-based version of Word can’t be a Google Docs alternative, because Word can’t into spreadsheets and presentations.
Proprietary bullshit
It does not work on my work-computer, since office macros and some formatting renders differently across versions. Other required software constraints make windows unusable for me.
Is there a German-hosted instance? The URL https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/login/ is making me wanna barf and no way I’m clicking it to risk seeing more Fr*nch.
lol what did the French do to you?
It’s okay, you can curse on the internet.
