I recently noticed just how much I use my online office suite in Nextcloud these days and I have definitely reached a point where I use it more than I use Libreoffice installed on my notebook. There are a number of reasons for this.
Over the years, I have started to use different computers for different purposes, with somewhat of an overlap of projects. In other words, I use quite a number of my text and spreadsheet documents on several computers. One option would have been to put them on a server and then access them from a local Libreoffice installation. But mounting drives over the Internet is often cumbersome and slow, so having a word processor and speadsheet app in the browser, directly accessing the documents just works a lot better. On my Nextcloud installation I use OnlyOffice instead of Collabora Online, and, truth be told, OnlyOffice’s compatibility with ‘docx’, ‘xlsx’ and other proprietary formats is significantly better than the Libreoffice version included in Ubuntu 22.04. Also, I haven’t missed much functionality in the browser I would have in a local Libreoffice install. Quite amazing how far software in the browser has come. And lastly, I do use my online office installation on my own server to collaboratively edit documents with other people simultaneously. Yes, things have really moved ‘online’ for me in the past two years and I am very happy that there are several options to privately and securely store, edit, share and collaborate on documents with other people outside of the hyperscaler’s domain.