[ams6110]

> what's the issue with just running LibreOffice on your computer

The key advantage to Google Docs, an otherwise ordinary if not fairly lightweight word processer, is the ease of sharing (even if only with yourself on multiple devices) and collaborating with others.

I've never heard of LibreOffice online, but depending how well it does those things, it might or might not be viable.

As a word processor alone, Google Docs is nothing special and LibreOffice probably has more features.

[rlvesco7]

Ease of sharing is precisely why it's so powerful. I can send a link to a shared spreadsheet without the person having to login. Very little friction. Also, being able to co-edit in real time is very powerful. I think libreoffice offline is great, but for 80% of my use cases, gdocs is more convenient and useful. But I'm no longer comfortable with google having so much of my personal and business life.

[tony101]

Have you considered G Suite? If you are going to stick with Google Docs, at least you can get a legal agreement that bars Google from mining or otherwise using your documents.

[joecool1029]

What legal agreement? It's not like they won't weasel out of it anyway. I'm fairly certain they were scanning emails for ad targeting up until the past year or so.

GSuite is ok when it works most times, when it doesn't it's a nightmare. Google is literally the worst company I've ever done business with. In fact, over the past decade I've had to reach out to various support levels on different products and can say they stand at a remarkable 0% solve rate. (Chromium's bug tracker I've had some success with but it's not 100% a Google product)

The latest contract breech I've had with them is regarding their SLA agreement. We had a client's account become inaccessible for a week. This caused them 2 days of work downtime as their quotes and business correspondence were all tied up in the account. The SLA defines a Downtime as:

"Downtime" means, for a domain, if there is more than a five percent user error rate. Downtime is measured based on server side error rate.

We wrote about the issue, figured out the cause was likely due to an error in the half-assed rollout of the new admin panel (they currently have two in production), and yet we were not granted a half-month credit for the downtime as the SLA stipulated.

[tony101]

> "What legal agreement?"

This is the agreement that I was referring to: https://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_terms.html

Specifically, see section 5.2.

Also, Google advertises this as a feature to G Suite users: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en

[TotempaaltJ]

> I'm fairly certain they were scanning emails for ad targeting up until the past year or so.

Not a great source (it's a while ago), but I was at a talk from I think a Google AI researcher once (he might've been a VP). I remember him saying that Google hasn't actually been scanning emails for a long time now, because they're processing too many emails for even Google to parse. Too big data.

[njarboe]

Dropbox does file sharing better than anybody, I think. Share with yourself and others. Pay a small fee for a better product and know it they have an incentive to please you. You can use any software products when sharing with Dropbox. I have been happy with it for many years and have never had any problems, knock on wood.

[PeterisP]

For me, the key point of sharing documents in google docs is that it solves the simultaneous editing problem, which simple file sharing (Dropbox and others) does not.

You can easily have three people editing the same paragraph in google docs; whether libreoffice online is a viable alternative depends on how it handles that.