3 ms·

I'm yet to figure out why we keep chasing this notion that everything should be on the cloud. StarOffice/LibreOffice was open sourced 25 years ago. It is still

I'm yet to figure out why we keep chasing this notion that everything should be on the cloud. StarOffice/LibreOffice was open sourced 25 years ago. It is still maintained and developed to this day. It can run on any operating system you need, and it uses the same data formats that any "cloud solution" will use as well. It can not be a matter of "it doesn't have online multi-writer collaboration tools", because if that was such a killer feature, there would be at least a handful of companies developing plugins to support this - or even developed in the project itself. It can not be a matter of "data always available online", because you could solve this with a virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced with your work computer. The funny thing to me is that mobile-first people prefer to have an app for each separate task, while PC-first people would rather have everything inside a browser window.

123pie123 2y ago
it's a part of the bigger picture of IT architecture How much should things (data/ compute/ infrastructure) be distributed vs centralised There's no definitive answer, but there's trends which change over time or should i say they go around and around Almost like reinventing the circle every few years, because old = bad, new = good
marsokod 2y ago
> It can not be a matter of "data always available online", because you could solve this with a virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced with your work computer. That's exactly my reason for using nextcloud and other apps like that though. I want to be able to browse my own files from my phone or any other safe device, and that's what nextcloud offers. It is literally a "virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced" with any device, much like bewcloud. I personally use nextcloud because I am using its other features as well, and there is no denying it suffers from being a jack of all trades, master of none, but having your data in the cloud, being able to access you admin paperwork, share data with your relatives or even random people, or manage a calendar amongst several people is a fairly frequent use case.
- rglullis 2y ago
  > I want to be able to browse my own files from my phone or any other safe device How much data do you have? Why not simply replicate this data between your devices? My "office documents" are ~4.8GB, according to the file browser. I simply just have it on Syncthing and copy everything to phone/laptop/workstation/NAS.
  - marsokod 2y ago
    With personal photos, PDFs and everything, that's 3-4TB. With pure documents, that's still around 100-200GB. The thing is, I don't know what I will need at a given time so I cannot just have a subset synced. Like when some friends I am visiting abroad wanted to have pictures of my house, or of an event we did with our children, now I can browse through them live.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
> I'm yet to figure out why we keep chasing this notion that everything should be on the cloud. In the old days, the browser was a way to get apps/services to users in way where dealing with Microsoft was reduced to the least possible. Microsoft knew this, that's why it kept IE6 broken for so long. These days, it's a way to get apps/services to users without dealing with app stores or having to care about the platform at all - which may be desktop or mobile these days. Also no one wants to carry storage devices with them any more. I really don't want this to be the case but I bet in 10 years USB flash drives and SD cards stop being a thing. PCs are no longer the main computing device of the masses.
- rglullis 2y ago
  > Also no one wants to carry storage devices with them any more. I don't think that's an active choice. I think this is something that Google and Apple keep pushing for the same reason that MS kept "IE6 broken for so long": the less available storage on the phone, the more people are locked to their cloud services. > PCs are no longer the main computing device of the masses. Sure, but we are talking about "Office suite in the cloud" here. Of course you are going to hear the exceptional case of someone that writes their own novels or powerpoint presentations on their phone, but I'm willing to bet that the for the majority of office workers, their main method of interacting with the application is through a big screen PC + keyboard and mouse.

123pie123 2y ago

it's a part of the bigger picture of IT architecture How much should things (data/ compute/ infrastructure) be distributed vs centralised There's no definitive answer, but there's trends which change over time or should i say they go around and around Almost like reinventing the circle every few years, because old = bad, new = good

marsokod 2y ago

> It can not be a matter of "data always available online", because you could solve this with a virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced with your work computer. That's exactly my reason for using nextcloud and other apps like that though. I want to be able to browse my own files from my phone or any other safe device, and that's what nextcloud offers. It is literally a "virtual online drive that can be browsed and/or synced" with any device, much like bewcloud. I personally use nextcloud because I am using its other features as well, and there is no denying it suffers from being a jack of all trades, master of none, but having your data in the cloud, being able to access you admin paperwork, share data with your relatives or even random people, or manage a calendar amongst several people is a fairly frequent use case.

rglullis 2y ago
> I want to be able to browse my own files from my phone or any other safe device How much data do you have? Why not simply replicate this data between your devices? My "office documents" are ~4.8GB, according to the file browser. I simply just have it on Syncthing and copy everything to phone/laptop/workstation/NAS.
- marsokod 2y ago
  With personal photos, PDFs and everything, that's 3-4TB. With pure documents, that's still around 100-200GB. The thing is, I don't know what I will need at a given time so I cannot just have a subset synced. Like when some friends I am visiting abroad wanted to have pictures of my house, or of an event we did with our children, now I can browse through them live.

RiverCrochet 2y ago

> I'm yet to figure out why we keep chasing this notion that everything should be on the cloud. In the old days, the browser was a way to get apps/services to users in way where dealing with Microsoft was reduced to the least possible. Microsoft knew this, that's why it kept IE6 broken for so long. These days, it's a way to get apps/services to users without dealing with app stores or having to care about the platform at all - which may be desktop or mobile these days. Also no one wants to carry storage devices with them any more. I really don't want this to be the case but I bet in 10 years USB flash drives and SD cards stop being a thing. PCs are no longer the main computing device of the masses.

rglullis 2y ago
> Also no one wants to carry storage devices with them any more. I don't think that's an active choice. I think this is something that Google and Apple keep pushing for the same reason that MS kept "IE6 broken for so long": the less available storage on the phone, the more people are locked to their cloud services. > PCs are no longer the main computing device of the masses. Sure, but we are talking about "Office suite in the cloud" here. Of course you are going to hear the exceptional case of someone that writes their own novels or powerpoint presentations on their phone, but I'm willing to bet that the for the majority of office workers, their main method of interacting with the application is through a big screen PC + keyboard and mouse.