[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software#Office_s...

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...

Even though many formal processes still require printable PDFs, we are slowly migrating to something paperless, or at least not paper-centric.

Google docs is still great when you need to make something you mean to print, it just tends to not be that often anymore.

I even use markdown shortcuts to format in google docs nowadays.

Not being Microsoft Office®-compatible does not make something not an office suite. In that case, there is (by design) only one Office® suite in the world

> not a wiki/markdown editor

I was wondering if you meant WYSIWYG editing as opposed to markdown editing, but then you say

> La Suite Docs seems a product more similar to Atlassian Confluence

which is WYSIWYG (the best web-based wysiwyg editor I've ever used, in fact; even if I'd never choose it for being a vendor lock-in that has shown they want to own your data by removing the self-hosted options, maybe with exceptions for giant enterprises idk but at least we had to migrate and it wasn't fun)

so then what are you saying? What makes an 'office suite' an office suite to you?

In the last 10 years I've been spending much more time at the office consulting and editing confluence and web pages (sharepoint / mkdocs / readme and other markdown based resources) than the cumulative time spent on word, excel, powerpoint and pdf documents. I imagine it is the same for a significant portion of the population.

Also, libreoffice is already a thing and nobody edits office365 documents using the web versions except when their employer can't/don't want to pay the license for the full version or the client is not vailable on their OS (linux users). Libreoffice doesn't have that problem, you only really need storage with sharing facilities, not featurefull web clients for your docs.

whatever doesn't map 1:1, imo just trash it.

if you can't do your work using markdown, you should be fired.

if i'm downvoted it is by people who deserve to be fired.

If not, they can adapt.

Doing layout is not easy. Programming layouts well requires real expertise, which is why most layout engines expose a gui and let you deal with larger text components graphically. Maybe someone else will come up with a usability innovation here, but I'm not aware of it, and markdown certainly doesn't have that capability.

There are plenty of UI editors where they give you the basics for formatting and inserting stuff.

Markdown is fairly portable, and with AI it is easy to generate and share as well.

- a word processor - a spreadsheet application - presentation software

This doesn't look like it has any of these

- chat

- video calls

- notion

Might now be more important to an office than word processing or presentation software?

- Word processor: https://github.com/suitenumerique/docs

- Spreadsheet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/calc

All of this goes out the window when you're dealing with a government bureaucracy that has hyper specific document formatting requirements.

This is a real foundational need of nearly every business at some point. Every court system and government agency has their own rules and they need to be tracked and followed perfectly. There are whole sub-industries around dealing with this for legal documents in MS Word.

By a "decent layout" engine, you'd like the ability to change fonts, add spacing between paragraphs, segment the page into regions, e.g. by changing the number of columns on a page, insert images and diagrams and choose how text wraps around them, create captions for embedded media, set page numbering policies (or navigational policies for web generation), generate table of contents, set table headers, make more complex tables with merged cells and different types of boundaries, generate table of references, generate tabs, then export to a web page, to a pdf, or to whatever other format you want, hopefully all from the same source. Then when you send it out for review, people can attach their comments to portions of the document, you can accept or reject their changes, there is a document revision history, etc.

So for example, you could write up a quarterly report by importing summary financial data into your spreadsheet, doing some basic analysis, export tables to your word processor, generate some bar charts or graphs, draw some boxes and arrows with your drawing program, stick that into your word processor, add some footnotes and hyperlinks, put the same info into a slide presentation. Then if you want, you could save that as a pdf or turn into a webpage, etc.

One time I had to write up documentation for various security certifications, and that was my introduction to the world of Microsoft office. Learning office made the project more fun, I had never used it before and was impressed with the functionality.

That said, I don't think most people who have office suites actually need a full powered office suite. Probably markdown + slack is enough for a lot of people, but I always like a good drawing or diagram.

Most people I know have shifted to google suite, it really has everything you need and is OS independent. But apart from the convenience of being browser-based, it is just another MS Office clone. The google drawing functionality is very basic, I often wish you could integrate something like excalidraw into it.

I am not suggesting this project needs to keep adding clones of MS Office functionality until it turns into Libre Office, but funded by the French government. That would be a waste. Instead, why not make it better? Reimagine it? Look, for example, at excalidraw. It's fantastic. It was really a fresh take on the stuff people were doing with visio.

I think there is lots of room to make a truly modern office suite instead of another MS Office rehash, so I would encourage this project to go its own way and do something interesting if they intend to be a replacement for proprietary office suites like google suite or MS Office.

When any random company makes a Build vs. Buy decision the question is “is this a core competency?” Most companies use a package from MS or GOOG because it’s unlikely that they’ll be so good at productivity software that it’s (A) worth distracting themselves from their actual job and (B) good enough. The same caveats apply here.

>Microsoft Used China-Based Engineers to Support Product Recently Hacked by China

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-sharepoint-hack...

Open source alternatives, audited by international teams could be much more trust worthy than closed sourced black boxes.

I suppose the assumption is that every HN reader follows headline hacking news, which is valid but still I did a double-take at the comment.

Android has a higher bounty than Iphone. Anyway, sorry about your easily hackable phone. Hope you arent a VIP.

Minor powers still bend to the great powers.

so likely a decade or more of double spending in the meanwhile.

that's 2 election terms in France for context. Good luck making the political parties agree to this.

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

People always want more and it will never be finished.

But after some thought, I feel a cloud collaboration suite makes more sense as big orgs often run on online-first solutions like Sharepoint. So they can tick the essential boxes by being an online collaboration suite, and fill in formatting features later.

Though your points on speed and architecture do make me wonder if Python was their best choice...

LibreOffice has a cloud version :). From what they presented at T-Dose like 10 years ago, it's basically an instance of the software running on the server, cut up into tiles and displayed on a webpage as zoomable image using Leafletjs, the same way that google maps worked before switching to vector graphics 15 years ago. Clicks and other input events are presumably emulated on the server and the resulting display update is sent back to the client, a bit like VNC but using a map library

"The BND stated that these expenditures are being used not only to sustain the ongoing war in Ukraine but also to expand Russia’s sub-threshold operations against countries on NATO’s eastern flank."

https://defence24.com/armed-forces/half-of-the-defence-budge...

The real bottleneck lies on the database side, but it is rare for an average organization to actually hit its limits. Don't think at Microsoft scale if you aren't them.

good for the french, they made the right choice.

The welfare state for corporate interests is alive and well though, and costs much more. As if we have "real capitalism" - not even on a scale of local bakeries any more. Even the small businesses often are just a shop owned by a corporation.

In the US (2022): https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/rising-corporate-concent... (paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20220621)

> They calculate that since the 1930s, the share of the US economy dominated by the top 1 percent of companies (when sorted by assets) has increased to 90 percent, up from 70 percent. Meanwhile, the asset share of the top 0.1 percent of companies has risen to 88 percent, up from 47 percent.

Same with welfare state. Which countries do you count as non-welfare states? And when do they stop being a welfare state? Let’s take Poland as an example. When do they stop being a welfare state? If they lower the unemployment payments, will they stop being a welfare state?

And at what timescale do you think Poland will stop existing because of demographics?

This is all a fact.

And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?

- https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151...

- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...

For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker, this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep these onerous regulations to some extent) A very relevant issue in present-day France.

I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?

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 + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.

"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."

Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.

"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."

Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.

Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."

This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.

Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.

"This is all a fact."

Sure thing buddy

This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.

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.)

Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.

The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.

What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.

If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.

One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.

Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.

That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.

Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.

Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.

But when you think about it, their survival depends on it, so it makes perfect sense. Most of those making those arguments have cushy bullshit jobs, completely dependent on stealing the work of others to live. Funnily enough, you would pay them to do nothing; it would be preferable for society because it would cost less money, and they wouldn't be able to create insane bureaucracy to satisfy their power trip.

But it doesn't matter; reality has a way to always catch up and expose the liars. The system is clearly unsustainable, and enemies have been probing for weakness for a while now. It's unclear how long we have left until a full-strength attack happens but it seems hard to avoid now.

The French state spends 57% of all French GDP [2]. For context, this is higher than what the Soviet Union spent in the years before the communist regimen felt (41% to 47% during the 1980s [3]).

How much taxes shall we pay to "support our independence"? Will I be allowed to keep at least 10% of what I earn, or am I supposed to give it all to the state to live in this wonderful Socialist utopia?

And here you are, asking to increase taxes even more. The only way out of this madness is a civil war. We are past any sanity left.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France

[2] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/government-at-a-glance-...

[3] https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557755186/ch05...

EDIT: The wikipedia page is indeed wrong: "The overall rate of social security and tax on the average wage in 2022 was 82% of gross salary". This was the tax wedge of these 2 contributions, not the average tax on wage as the Wikipedia page states. Average tax on gross wage in France is 47%. The worker then has to pay VAT and other fees/taxes from the remaining 53%.

"In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge."

Note how it says "of the total tax wedge" not "of their salary.

The tax wedge itself is 47.2% in 2024 in France. This is indeed high by international standards but nowhere as high as you claimed.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

Also nobody is talking about taxing income even more.

I do agree however with the sanity part, although I think of a whole different subset of people than you.

So yeah, thanks I guess. Now I really really want to move to France.

Isn't it the point OP is making - France has much higher taxes compared to US because the state provides pensions, healthcare and higher education and US don't?

Someone making 2500€ gross will take home 1885€ per month after taxes and contributions. On which you can add a 20% VAT. Even should you want to operate in incredibly bad faith and add employer contributions, it would only amount to 3175 in total. For fun, I tried to figure out what would be needed for someone to have 82% of their salary going away into taxes. It is physically impossible to go anywhere above 55%, the math just stops scaling. Even taking employer costs into account, the max will be 65%. This all starts happening when you have the lowly gross salary of about 30 000€/month, something that I'm sure you're being paid right now to complain about to much about it.

Hell, even the damn link you're posting shows that you can't read:

> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, compared with 77% of the total OECD average tax wedge

What the fuck do you think tax brackets cover, ponies ? And acting offended about it like it's some unacceptable thing when the OECD average is... 5 percentage point lower ?

> 82% of the average gross salary in France is indeed taken by the state,

You literally can't read.

> In other words, in France the take-home pay of an average single worker, after tax and benefits, was 71.9% of their gross wage

> his means that an average married worker with two children in France had a take-home pay, after tax and family benefits, of 83.1% of their gross wage

Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?

On a €2500 gross salary you take home €1651 (which is a very low salary in France very close to the minimum salary). But I guess you think the gross salary is what the company, by law, has to say they pay you, instead of what the total cost for the company of your salary.

See, in France, even if you are getting close to the minimum salary, the state is taking 33% of the cake for themselves. This is for people that earn very little. For people that earn average salaries of €2669 liquid (€5000 gross for the company), the French state takes 47% of the cake.

It's a normal mistake for people that don't actually have to support the costs themselves. Once people actually start a small business or pay more attention to their own wages and how much is being taken away, they figure out how it actually works.

No, thank you, I am quite well versed in the concept of superbrut, and actively pay more than a SMIC in taxes every year: you won't play that game with me. Va jouer, comme on dit.

They're employer _contributions_ to the system. They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population.

You don't get to claim it as "it would be your salary", because we both damn well know you'd never pay that back into the salary should it go away. We've had the experience every time, with tax writeoffs on SMICs, VAT lowered to 5.5% which led to zero jobs created and no changes in employment conditions, etc. You might even be old enough to remember the MEDEF's "1 million jobs" pin, where they created... 20k. Cool. The reality of things is, you as an employer cannot be trusted to not fuck over employees, especially the weakest and most vulnerable of us all.

Once again, your own damn links prove that 1/ France isn't that far off the OECD average for taxation and 2/ actually does better in not slapping in a bunch of unrelated crap in taxes.

No, they are the taxes you pay that are not shown on your payslip.

> They're the price you pay for a healthy, well educated working population

Yes, you as a worker pay it.

> back into the salary should it go away

It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.

>It would be trivial for the government to make sure it does.

Yes, and we assume a spherical cow in a vacuum, I know.

There are countries in Europe that have done exactly that recently.

Besides Denmark which doesn't have employee contributions in the same way and is transparent about the full amount of taxes you are actually paying. Are you claiming that showing that on the payslip is somehow depressing wages in Denmark?

Nice. Look, I had a great idea for 0% worker taxes in France. You just change all the taxes accounting to make the numbers look like you take them from the employee instead of the worker, and puff, magical 0% taxes! It's great, isn't it?

> Now, there are ways to solve these expenses, they involve cutting all pensions. I'm sure you'll be okay with letting your parents, and mine, die, right ?

Man, I don't know you, I value my morning coffee more than your parents getting their retirement at 61 and receiving more - after taxes - than people that actually work to pay for their fantastic retiree life. But, I thought that all the taxes you paid are supposed to provide for your retirement. Are you actually telling me this is all a Ponzi scheme mandated by the State? I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Yep, that's probably why my parents are unable to retire before 65, because they'd otherwise be under the poverty line. Both of them retiring with rather high physical damage from their career.

Fucking hell, you keep reading headlines halfway, misunderstand them and then badly apply them broadly to a situation you don't understand

How is that bad faith? It's basic common sense to count that together. Total cost is what matters to employers. You can't compare different countries either if you don't hacks like this that try to confuse the workers about how much they are paying.

e.g.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Payroll_...

taxes in Denmark are presumably several times higher than in France?

The initial claim is "82% of wages go to taxes", which is inaccurate, a lie and a bad faith argument.

So you don't care about the size of your salary? Fair enough...

It's all the same to them, whether the social insurance contributions are shown on your payslip or not is just an accounting detail. It's still a tax on labour and no different that the share you are paying.

Please stop being so dense.

> never raised salaries in response to their social contributions going down.

Clearly fixable with a very simple law since some other countries somehow managed to achieve this.

That figure is pretty tired. In France, the pension scheme is counted as public spending. In neighbouring countries, the very similar, mandatory, pension schemes count as private.

The comparison makes little sense if you don't compare equivalent spending scopes, and equivalent service provided. If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.

> The average rate of social security and tax state contributions from French workers is now 82% of their salary

This figure, on the other hand, is straight up made-up bullshit. I dare you to find a salary that reaches 82% on URSSAF's salary simulator [1]. The OECD report quote is:

> In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge

82% of the State's tax base are from income tax and social security contributions. That doesn't mean peopole are taxed 82% of their income.

[1]: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...

That "very similar" does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Your neighboring Swiss pillars 2 and 3 and not similar at all - they are neither financial pyramids that depend on population growth, nor are they subject to some arbitrary "points adjustment" bullshit (a retiree takes out exactly what they put in without any shenanigans from politicians or "Agirc-Arrco board of directors").

> If health care was to privatized, for instance, I'm pretty sure we would be worse off, but that number would go down.

Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?

The critical point if my claim is whether or not they are mandatory. Pillar 2 is mandatory for employees. Whether employees are forced to fork their cash to the state or to a private management company doesn't change the scheme or the benefits you get, but it changes OP's number.

There's plenty more to say about the way pension schemes are set up, their benefits and drawbacks, but that's unrelated to my point.

> Care to elaborate why French middle class (we are on HN after all, not on Jacobin) would be worse off on Swiss health care model, for example?

I'm going to talk about the French as a whole here. The key metric to me is the share of money collected that is paid back to beneficiaries. In private insurance systems, it is usually between 75% and 90%. The french assurance maladie is between 96% and 99% [1].

[1]: https://www.securite-sociale.fr/dossiers/quels-sont-les-cout...

This might be the most insane comment I've ever seen on this forum.

What in the hell are you talking about? Did you actually read that first link, completely fail to understand a single word of it, and then the number 82 just magically fell out of the sky?

Considering the number of replies here saying "source does not contain claim" / "that is a misinterpretation of what it says"... LLMs are still autocomplete functions. Exceptionally good ones, but they don't reason. And they kiss your boots unprompted. Beware of whatever opinions this thing is justifying to you

Even California billionaires would rather leave the state than pay the 5% wealth tax. All to provide “services” that are generally superfluous or tied to corrupt kickbacks.

They do not need to be linked, they generally aren't, in the EU at least.

Why are you keep repeating this myth?

The only relevant player who might break up oligarchies before they become to powerful is the state they operate in.

Why do you write like someone's crazy uncle on Facebook? The caps are inappropriate here, as is the hysteria and hyperbole.

> Oligarchs buy up competition

You realise that those advocating for free markets are against oligarchy, right? That they say that in most, if not all cases, regulatory capture and monopolies are the causes of lack of competition, right?

My personal setup is Emacs/org-mode, using babel for the rest; I use Python with Polars, Plotly, and very occasionally SymPy just to avoid using Maxima if I'm already in Python. I see no reason at all to use LibreOffice, MS Office, or anything similar. This is what's actually needed. Billions should be invested in IT training, not in copies of software from another era designed to let untrained secretarial staff use a desktop.

I used to use it all day every day and now i use it once a year maybe (often for government related things, coz theyre often the only ones still asking me to fill out and sign PDF forms).

Most office functions are better supplanted with a decent cms, spreadsheet, email and something to let you create forms for people to fill in.

- the logic is hidden; until you click on a cell, you don't know "what it actually contains"

- there is no entry point, no main(), so there is no way to read it other than keeping 100% of what the sheet does in your head, or ignoring parts of it and risking breaking them while working on others

- the logic tends to be coded in single lines rather than multi-line with proper indentation, which makes reading it very difficult

This is just the conceptual basis, without even counting the improper auto-formatting of cells that has even led to renaming genes to prevent them from being considered dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... or the absurdities regarding date calculations.

They can be convenient when you have to play around with a few pieces of tabular data, yes, but the price you pay is much higher than working with high-level languages that would be easy for even the average user to understand if only they had started with them.

True as it may be that they are slow, I doubt it's caused by the use of dynamic programming languages.

> The money should be secured immediately that cannot be touched by the upcoming governments. It should increase taxes. Independence has a price. We as Europeans should be ready to pay it.

You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.

Depends which ones. Python? Definitely a source of slowness.

I would first blame the programmers, the design and lack of specialty offloading before blaming any programming language. Well designed web calls scale nearly linearly with usage and usually poor design or programming is the source of slowness. You can always trade language complexity for speed but assuming it is the cause of all perceived slowness is a poor man's view.

It is the same story every time again, first it was java, which has so many large scale projects most people won't even know it's running things they use, now it's apparently python who is to blame for all slowness on the web. When the next JIT or scripted language comes along which is not someone's favourite pet that will get the blame.

I also denounce the notion that trading language complexity for slowness is the case. Python is already complex, and there's some language and frameworks that are actually quite a bit easier to use for web backends. Like java, or dotnet. It just makes no sense to use python for this usecase, even if you ignore the slowness.

But that's not completely true, there is one very good reason to use python. Your devs know it. But, that doesnt say anything about the language itself.

Shhh, don't tell them.

(Kidding, of course.)

The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.

Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.

But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.

Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician.

I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".

Any example of a politician carrier killed by an attempt to enforce antitrust?

Him putting Lisa Khan in charge of antitrust enraged the tech oligarchs, who then all went MAGA and bought Trump the election.

Didn’t Harris actually raise and spend more than Trump on that election?

And the fact that a 3rd party supports an opponent does not kill any politician's career. Biden retired by himself, following his own party's pressure. And Harris is still around, I believe.

Yes it is. It's the same reason desktop GUI apps are now slower than Windows 95-era apps that were written in C.

This is not a situation where you'll have thousands of people editing the same document, that'd be insane with Django for sure - but at general collaboration tooling with <100 (random number I made up) editing, Django is unlikely gonna be the bottleneck

What part of your document editor needs to be backed by a relational database?

Why use an MVT system if you don't need the Model part of it?

I see, in your broad and experienced mind, document editors don't have users, permissions, and the whole document management itself, comments on lines/threads, reactions on comments

Seriously, theyre all as cookie cutter perfect usecase for Django as you can get, but I guess you haven't actually thought about the domain and just wanted to take a dumb on other devs with intern-to-junior level insights

And in this case, as would be obvious from thinking about it, the only part it's not suited for is the live syncing of the text edit on the frontend, which is one one small part of the whole.

Now go check if they're doing it or you're just suggesting from the dunning kruger symptom.

TLDR: C++, WASM, and some form of GRPC with C++ on the server side as well. Because you need a language that's fast, can contain high complexity and large programs without collapsing (which is a short list of languages) and can work fast for the bits that need speed.

But thanks for answering honestly.

There's new languages where it's a bit of an open question still where they lie on the spectrum. Go would be one of them. I'd guess somewhere between Python and Java. Javascript I would argue is between perl and python. And Rust ... well ... good question.

An office suite is a gigantic application, which will need feature upon feature upon feature upon feature. If you want it working on the web, I'd propose something like C++ and WASM.

Edit: also appears to be based in the eu, how fitting for this thread.

https://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt

> With Docs our job is not to replace Microsoft Office

https://docs.numerique.gouv.fr/docs/ed2e1dbf-07a2-43bb-ae1e-...

Also: like when switching from AWS to EU provider, the goal is not feature parity. Not only it is costly to implement, but also a reason why so many features are in AWS or Office is to ensure vendor lock-in due to feature comparisons.

Learning to do more with less is a feature, not a bug.

Can you expand on this or source this? I'm quite interested in OpenCloud, and haven't heard anything about this. I searched for a few keywords (espionage, legal, lawsuit), which only lands your comment on top.

https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/262#discuss...

They seem to avoid openly discussing and comparing products to avoid further action. Apparently some of the former members of OwnCloud have switch to Heinlein (maker of OpenCloud) and Kiteworks isn't happy about this.

The closest thing to an alternative office suite from an European company is Proton, and even that is barely a replacement.

?? this is not true, please provide a source

I always laugh my ass off when people cry about Microsoft and Office. Well, the thing is that there are no real competitors, and we can't blame them if everyone else is more incompetent than they are.

Apple has been pretending to work on an alternative for years, and it is still nowhere near as powerful/good.

But we live in a feminized world, where it is profitable to virtue signal by siding with the pretend victims even though they are not any better than the winners and, in fact, just as bad, as Apple routinely demonstrates.