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.

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.

Yes, true.

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 I just looked into this because I don’t seem to be missing any “essential features” and it seems that there are major differences between the corporate Store version and the F-Droid version that I use. Pretty hard making sense of it all but it seems that on the FOSS version some otherwise paid features are free (including map downloads), I guess because there would be no mechanism to charge for them when there’s no app-store account. Others don’t seem to be available at all, but apparently I don’t want those.

Anyway, the fact that they publish on F-Droid is the reason I’ve used this app for over a decade and why I never miss an opportunity to shill for it, like right now. Which I hope counts as payment in kind.

PSA: there is already a FOSS OSM maps client that predates Organic Maps by a decade and is much more powerful. It’s called OsmAnd.

Personally I wish all you guys would get with the FOSS spirit and pool your efforts a bit more instead of forking things every two years and reinventing the wheel. A good maps app is a hard challenge, there’s not room for 10 of them.

Prediction: you’ll never get actually read most of what ends up on this to-read list.

Burning things down and starting again is a silly fantasy. Just like the dream of revolution in politics, in practice it never works and only makes things even worse than they were already. This is a terrible take.

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.