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fin ,

Are they trying to become Google alternative?

Blackmist ,

Only if they start shutting all their services down if they don’t become the world leader within the first 3 years.

flop_leash_973 ,

Doesn’t appear you can do anything of that via the Drive mobile app. Maybe one day they will make that possible.

If they can ever get a spreadsheet application I could fully get away from Google for that kind of thing without losing out on anything I care about.

awesome_lowlander ,

The only open source mentioned in the post is their encryption. Not the document editing software. OP please remove your change to the article title, it’s extremely misleading.

gnutard ,

Well, he’s not wrong. It is ‘open-source’, not Free Software.

awesome_lowlander ,

? It’s not open source, AFAIK.

ForgottenFlux OP ,

The company confirmed that code for docs will be open sourced “soon,” allowing for independent auditing and verification of its security claims.

awesome_lowlander ,

Fair enough! That’s exciting news

elucubra ,

A lot of people confuse open source with community driven/governed.
If things go awry, you’ll be locked-in, married to Proton.

asdfasdfasdf ,

How do you mean? You’d just export your data.

sunzu ,

Proton drive has export?

asdfasdfasdf ,

Yes? You select your folders / files and click download.

bquintb ,
@bquintb@midwest.social avatar

Awesome…I can move my budget over to my proton.me account now.

nieminen ,

I don’t think there’s a spreadsheet app yet. Hopefully soon

BlueMagma , (edited )

Open source ? Does that mean I can host my own ? Would it be compatible with other self hosted instance ?

EDIT: the only source code I found hasn’t been maintained for 3 years.

nek0d3r ,
@nek0d3r@lemmy.world avatar

As I’ve slowly been expanding my homelab, NextCloud caught my attention. I haven’t tried it quite yet, but it might be closer to what you’re looking for.

BlueMagma ,

Thanks, I’ll have a look

Voroxpete ,

If you do want to host your own google docs, look into Onlyoffice, or LibreOffice with Collabora

MisterFrog ,
@MisterFrog@lemmy.world avatar

They’re just too expensive. Like, sure, it costs money to run, but 3.49€/month (the discounted 24 month rate) for the mail only plan, 15 GB storage. (41.88€, $45.17 USD, $67.28 AUD per year)

That’s really expensive if you just want mail.

The other stuff, is also really expensive. To the point that makes you think, “there is no way google is making THIS much to make up the difference in advertising to me for a comparable plan”.

menemen ,
@menemen@lemmy.world avatar

If you just need an email account I’d suggest to have a look at posteo.de. I am with them for many years now. Price is good and terms also.

ruse8145 ,

Switched to them in 2022 after a 2-year of proton precisely because the revised proton plans were weird and because id heard a lot of negative stories about getting locked out (from the proton side, not losing password). Ironically I almost just went thru the lockout process but thankfully the email support guy was able to get things sorted.

Tbh I miss nothing and since I use simple login or anonaddy for most misc things, switching was easy. My proton account is de facto dead…I wouldn’t refuse to return, but I’m really just an a la carte guy.

aquafunk ,
@aquafunk@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.

then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data

it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental

macgyver ,
@macgyver@federation.red avatar

You get mailserver capabilities with that tier as well though. You shouldn’t be using the plus plan unless you need the email storage or host custom domains and don’t want to deal with the admin.

nieminen ,

To be fair, it’s not as clear as it could be that there are other “plus” plans. If you happen to land on the proton mail page when looking, they only show you the mail plus option (and unlimited). And even then really truncate what exactly you get for each paid option. There’s a page that I was only able to find after opening my free account (it exists when not logged in, just never found it) that explains in depth all the options and differences.

Annoyingly, most of the individual upgrade pages don’t give the 2 year purchase option either.

macgyver ,
@macgyver@federation.red avatar

Black Friday is your friend with them

spiderman ,

It’s all good but I wish they increase the storage for free tier a bit more

SuperSpruce ,

I wish they could provide more storage for paid users, or allow users to a la carte add storage. $4/mo to merely match Gmail’s 15GB feels a bit steep, and it must be feasible for them to offer their mail service with 100GB+ for $5/mo.

spiderman ,

guess at eod both paid and free users feel the same

ruse8145 ,

I get the thought process from a market standpoint, but this is a trap we all fall into because the big services subsidize subsidize subsidize to keep you locked in. If you want 15gb free, you sell your privacy. That’s the equation, not “service a and b are equivalent except more gbs”.

spiderman ,

i am not comparing their storage with gmail, i just think 500 mb might be little less. i love proton for what it is, but i can’t continue using their services if the limit hits.

ruse8145 ,

Agreed there may be a middle ground somewhere. 1 GB in 2024 feels pretty light given I just bought 36 tb for the same price a cheap tablet…it’s just never gonna be parity.

DictatorGator ,

Is this meant as a Proton Notes equivalent ?

twei ,

No, but they’ve recently acquired standardnotes

fluxc0 ,

Proton at this very moment

I CANT STOP WINNING!

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/113e6a2c-b17a-4b8a-8267-f52c2705e83d.jpeg

exanime ,

Just signed up today for the family plan in my ongoing degoogling process

It’s a bit pricey but so far loving it. Specially Proton Pass, coming from bitwarden (which I liked), it’s nicer and faster, much faster

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

And so what happens to your passwords if Proton were to go offline and you needed to continue using Proton Pass? Do they have an open source server you can use like Bitwarden does or vaultwarden? Or are you essentially locking yourself into a new walled garden for no reason other than name recognition? Why not just use KeePassXC which is encrypted locally rather than share your password with a third party who can easily capture your private key password?

Alk ,

Because of their integration with simplelogin.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Vaultwarden/Bitwarden integrate with SimpleLogin… and they offer other alias service providers as well.

ruse8145 ,

Deeply curious about the down votes, isn’t this accurate?

ZeroHora ,
@ZeroHora@lemmy.ml avatar

Because the guy criticize Proton in every thread in the comments and clearly sealioning.

ruse8145 ,

Oh…I don’t usually see what other places people post unless they truly suck.

nutsack ,

I think a lot of these cloud-based password vaults will have a local database that syncs with the cloud. I think you can unlock them and access your passwords without internet access

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

Keyword… unlock, not add information or use them offline where they can sync to an open source backend. They are cloud-based password managers that are designed to operate online. The backend is not open source. It is designed to lock you into a walled garden.

nutsack , (edited )

The unlocking happens locally. it’s simply decrypting. also, i think you can export the data from proton pass.

it’s a cloud solution. keepassxc works great and I don’t know why you want something else to replace it

ruse8145 ,

Browser integration with quality biometric login is a beautiful thing. Keepass’ implementation of both is trash, and keepassxc’s browser integration may actually be worse than the original.

That having been said I always recommend to people they use two managers, with keepass being the secure base for things you don’t often need convenient access to like savings accounts, password manager passwords, tax services, etc.

bitwarden, proton, et al I use for the day-to-day…I don’t give any fucks if my Lemmy account is lost for example.

asdfasdfasdf ,

Proton Pass works offline. Proton isn’t a walled garden.

timewarp ,
@timewarp@lemmy.world avatar

It will cache credentials for a short time so you can still access some of your passwords. It will not let you add new credentials. It’s like a web browser working in offline mode for a period of time. It is a cloud-based password manager with a closed-source server backend.

ruse8145 ,

“A walled garden is a garden enclosed by high walls, especially when this is done for horticultural rather than security purposes, although originally all gardens may have been enclosed for protection from animal or human intruders.”

Agreed proton isn’t this

"A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and/or media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. "

Try using thunderbird and id argue proton is this

asdfasdfasdf ,

Still, that seems like a combo of “comes with the territory of encrypted email” and “their software could use some major improvements”. I think closed platform is closed by design.

dan ,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

comes with the territory of encrypted email

AFAIK they haven’t tried to standardize their implementation, which to me implies that they’re not interested in interoperability. That’s unfortunate. I wouldn’t want to be locked in to a vendor like that.

At least some providers do try. FastMail published the spec for their modern, stateless replacement to IMAP through the IETF as “JMAP”, and built on top of existing RFCs where possible.

ruse8145 ,

Nah, fundamentally proton uses the same encryption as everyone else, they just have a central server to exchange keys rather than one of the open servers.

asdfasdfasdf ,

As everyone else like who? Gmail doesn’t do client side E2E encryption at all.

Manalith ,

My only gripe with Proton Pass so far is that I’m used to Bitwarden’s right-click autofill menu and some sites’ 2FA codes don’t automatically pop up for some reason.

BenPranklin , (edited )

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket again, that’s what makes degoogling such a difficult thing. There’s several proton services I intentionally avoid and use alternatives for so I don’t have to uproot my entire digital life to leave them if they start being shitty. If you go from using all google services to all proton you’re setting yourself up to need the same sort of big migration down the road. 15 years ago google was also an awesome company that kept making incredibly useful things for users just because they could and look at them now.

ruse8145 ,

Maps is what makes degoogling hard ;p

Everything else is pretty straightforward.

ruse8145 ,

Does pass support custom url filters yet? I self host and so I have a lot of 192.168 bookmarks…when I tried pass it had no way to organize them by url prefix (port number).

exanime ,

Good question, don’t know.

I’ll check it out and report back

zer0squar3d ,

Unfortunately it doesn’t yet. Having same issue.

exanime ,

Seems to work fine on my web front to deluge

gnuplusmatt ,

wake me when we can use them as a saml provider

Napain ,

notice the lack of the word ‘free’

ProgrammingSocks ,

Google Docs is free because they use your data for advertising and AI training.

Cyberjin ,

Get started by creating a free Proton Drive account today (if you don’t already have one). We are rolling out Docs starting today, and the feature will be available to all users over the next couple of days.

You can use it for free ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯

Napain ,

free as in freedom, doofus

not_amm ,

Specify that, “free” means two things in English, otherwise use “libre”, which means freedom in Spanish and it’s sometimes used to refer to free or libre software.

ruse8145 ,

You’re both as bad as each other

Muscar ,

Most “free” things aren’t free, you pay by them collecting your information and selling it. Anyone that automatically thinks something is bad because it isn’t free is dumb as fuck.

Napain ,

free as in freedom, doofus

nieminen ,

What the hell does this even mean?

gccalvin ,

I know there are different use cases for each, but generally do people prefer self hosted nextcloud, proton docs, or libre office?

variants ,

probably depends what youre into, I have my own home lab so I setup nextcloud with collabora for my personal stuff

Lem453 ,

FWIW collabora and open office can integrate with other clouds like Seafile and owncloud Infinite scale. So even without NextCloud it can be used. It can also be used stand alone.

fmstrat ,

Nextcloud and OnlyOffice. Collabora is basically a VNC session over LibreOffice. While OnlyOffice is web-native and has much better compatibility.

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I like how there seems to be more and more alternatives to MS Office, even from big companies like Google. Best case scenario, this could lead to companies actually starting to use an open format, like ODF, so that all these different office applications can be used without causing issues in the file and that would pave the way for open source alternatives, like LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, to become viable alternatives for a lot more people and companies. Do Google Docs and Proton Drive use/support ODF? I’m pretty sure MS Office supports it.

tourist ,
@tourist@lemmy.world avatar

I wish msoffice would just die a miserable death

Word is a pain in the ass. Resize a table column by 1px and the rest of the document gets absolutely fucked

Excel suffers from similarly frustrating UI issues, but my main problem with it is that it’s being used for things that it was never intended to be used for. On the extreme side, a company will shove all their HR info into one xlsx file and then someone will accidentally, somehow unrecoverably, delete it

More commonly, I’ve had to use it as a progress tracking/ticketing tool. An entire team adding rows, deleting rows, accidentally clearing formulas, highlighting random fucking cells, resizing columns etc. all at the same time. It’s just hell.

RecluseRamble ,

Abusing Excel as a crappy database is a very real and very widespread problem.

gibmiser ,

You use what ya got, and you don’t buy database software or hire a database guy until you know you need one

RecluseRamble ,

Probably true for most companies but I worked at one that had plenty of DB servers and developers, even developed their own database tech. Still, Excelitis as we called it was rampant.

Appoxo ,
@Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Nothings more permanent than a temporary solution.

Takumidesh ,

But access comes with office, so if you have excel you have at least a software that is intended to be used as a DB (efficacy aside)

micka190 ,

Let’s be real, using Excel as a makeshift database is probably still better than actually using Access lol

sevan ,

The only use case I can see for Access is when you absolutely must have a database and your company will not provide you a real database solution. I have experience with both, but haven’t touched Access in years (and hope to never do so again). To be fair, I also regularly use Excel for things that I should probably be using Word for because it is easier to get formatting right in Excel.

ruse8145 ,

And you’ve never heard of sqlite

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Have you ever tried just using Markdown?

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

When I started studying IT at a Berufskolleg (German word, literal transaltion would be something like job college or job school), we started learning about databases by using Access. We were all so happy when we were done with that and just used SQL. I fucking hate Access.

ruse8145 ,

It can also link nicely over odbc to full databases which are represented a nice tables…with links between sheets…waiiit a second.

ForgotAboutDre ,

It’s criminal that Microsoft has such a monopoly on word processing, they can’t even render text properly. It’s not an issue in Mac or Linux, but it is in all windows applications that aren’t using a chromium base.

Eggyhead ,

Employer: Print out this .doc and bring it to work.
Me, with a Mac: alright, here you go.
Employer: why did you print it like this?
Me: that’s what you sent me.

ruse8145 ,

Uses compute platform that’s spent (all of personal computer history) trying to exclude any outsiders from working with them, a design intention of Steve Jobs from day one leading to significant waste and suffering for the past 50 years.

Sad that Microsoft doesn’t care

At least Linux has a leg to stand on. The culture can be exhausting but is generally in the right.

Eggyhead ,

Life sure is terrible when people enjoy things you don’t, isn’t it?

ruse8145 ,

No idea what your point is. Are you arguing the history of apple as a morally depraved company?

Eggyhead ,

I was just talking about dealing with .doc files, but you are free interpret that however you want, buddy.

mutant_zz ,

Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.

If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.

ruse8145 ,

Wait who are the technical people you work with who are using things besides Excel?? Or by technical people do you specifically mean computer science people? Cause you get mech, civil, or electrical engineers in a room and I think I would have a heart attack if their designs were not all in Excel or word (+altium, solidkindaworks, etc)

bzah ,
@bzah@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Where I was working Excel was used for the specification of scientific data. You get stuff like thousands of rows in several sheets themselves in multiple files that inherit from one another and everything is edited by hand… And I maintained a tool that combined them to create binary files from this mess. Lot of fun.

ruse8145 ,

It…was intended for those things. Excel is modern business’ multi-tool. You’re not going to excise it until there is a solution for the HR person to do basic bulk data processing, basic Excel programming without having to acknowledge they are doing programming, etc.

The other path is better spreadsheet software, but let’s be honest most of the others are poor clones. Gsheets are nearly useless, only office is solid but…well, it’s just Excel but free. Open office is Excel millennium edition and libre while better than open, and has a few nice quality of life improvements, it’s still Excel.

tourist ,
@tourist@lemmy.world avatar

fair enough

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I feel you on that first part, I always use Markdown nowadays when I don’t have to use Word (or LibreOffice Writer in my case), I even use Marp to make presentations with Markdown. Since there’s no dragging stuff around and eyeballing if it’s actually coherent, it’s much quicker, the layout is always perfect and changing the layout doesn’t fuck up the entire slide/document.

antonim ,

Yes, Google Docs exports to ODF.

Fisch ,
@Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

By default?

antonim ,

No, there is no default option, just a dropdown that offers docx, pdf, rtf, txt, odf…

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