European. Liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. I never downvote opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine. Comments with insulting language, or snark, or other low-effort content, will also be ignored.
Indeed, confusing terminology. I consider that collaborative document editing is the activity, cloud hosting vs P2P is the technical implementation.
Like it or not, nobody much is doing the latter because it’s much harder to set up and the available cloud solutions provide a much (much) better user experience. I don’t say this a better situation but it’s the way things are.
Yes, in theory, although tricky to set up. What it cannot do, at least not without fiddly modules, and even then nowhere near as well as the cloud competition, is any kind of collaborative document editing. Which is where the world is at today.
Your initial response got peoples’ backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn’t provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.
The pernicious side of social media in microcosm. To say “it’s not collaborative” is somehow understood as shilling for big tech. Always the worst possible interpretation of every remark.
Agreed as to vim.
Yes yes. The issue here being that in the real world nobody much is doing the latter. But we’re getting off topic, LibreOffice is neither.
My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with vim. I don’t want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.
Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they’ve been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.
Honest question: who would use a non-collaborative standalone spreadsheet in 2025? I don’t get it.
Very useful concrete example of how these changes might be a problem. Thanks.
And the second is going extinct.
Mice? What is this thing you talk of?
Exactly. I do it pretty regularly and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years.
And yet people here are still saying “no biggie”. It’s pure status quo bias.
Come on, having a 3-key combo for such a common task is a PITA. There’s a reason people have been complaining about this for decades.
This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.
So, a bookmarks list basically.
Prediction: you’ll never actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.
Blah blah blah. Unencrypted data is the wrong default in 2025 for any OS. Linux should not be a poor man’s OS.
Sure. But defaults are important.
This is a case where Windows-bashing is hypocritical. Almost no Linux distro has disk encryption turned on by default (PopOS being the major exception).
It’s dumb and inexcusable IMO. Whatever the out-of-touch techies around here seem to think, normies do not have lumbering desktop computers any more. They have have mobile devices - at best laptops, mostly not even that.
If an unencrypted computer is now unacceptable on Android, then it should be on Linux too. No excuses.
Yep. Pathetic and embarrassing.
Realistically, there’s going to be no way to stop this. It’s too useful. It works and most people appreciate it. I know this because I have visited southern China recently. I’ve seen the train stations and coffee shops where people now think nothing of leaving their belongings completely unattended. This level of surveillance effectively makes petty crime impossible. It’s widely seen as progress, in a way it is progress, and there’s no going back.
The challenge remaining is to keep some level of democratic accountability over our governments. That’s feasible but it’s not going to be easy.