I absolutely share your animosity towards AI slop. Kind of sad though if as a result it is suspect if someone takes the time to both carefully formulate an answer and formats it in the hopes of bringing across the point. If it helps, check my UID, it should be clear I am not exactly Gen Z ;-). Although people my age also use AI.

But fair enough, these days, I too suspect AI if something looks to neat, so I get your point.

As I'm not a native English speaker I'll take that as a compliment ;-)

Although I personally ditched MS Office > 25 years and switched to Open Office and later Libre Office, I actually think they made the right decision, and I also see a lot of misunderstandings here.

Euro Office and OnlyOffice
To understand Euro Office it is important to understand that this is a fork of the AGPL licensed OnlyOffice. OnlyOffice is an Office suite that runs as a desktop application on Windows, Mac and Linux. But its main usage is in that it also run on a server giving you a full featured office suite that runs in the browser.
I have used the desktop version when I get documents in MS format that aren't handled properly by Libre. Notably embedded media of presentations didn't work for me in Libre when they worked well in OnlyOffice.
Unfortunately there are some questions on the background of the company behind it. There apparently are still strong ties with Russia. So companies have serious reservations on using OnlyOffice.

Nextcloud and Only/Euro Office and Collabora/LibreOffice
If you haven't looked up what Nextcloud is do so. It is not a cloud offering. It is Open Source software that allows anyone to self-host a 'cloud' offering you functionality like MS 365. You can self host, both as an individual as well as any organisation. There are also multiple third parties that host for you if you prefer.

For the functionality to allow you to create and edit documents in Nextcloud in the browser, it needs an 'engine'. You could use Collabora (based on LibreOffice) or OnlyOffice. This is actually the killer feature. Working simultaneous in a document is an important feature.
Collabora works pretty well for your home setup. I use it in my own Nextcloud deployment. However compared to OnlyOffice it is pretty clunky. If you get a setup with many users, OnlyOffice works a lot better. This has largely to do with the architecture and is not easy to solve.

Nextcloud the company
I have followed to some degree Nextcloud the company for a number of years. I am convinced that they are a genuine Open Source company. I realise there are never guarantees, but so far they walk the walk and talk the talk. They have a clear business model. They do not want to make money from your home setup. They like (don't demand) to see setups with large user bases to get their enterprise offerings which means support. The free/open versions are not crippled in any way. As far as I can the tell, the only technical difference is that you get extended support on older versions and can opt to be more conservative as new features end up in new releases a bit later.
They also don't offer a Cloud service themselves, they leave that to third parties.

Euro Office and sovereignty
Mainly due to the reservations organisations have with origin of OnlyOffice, but also apparently that cooperation with the company OnlyOffice was troublesome there is actually a great demand for a trusted fork of OnlyOffice. This is why Nextcloud, together with partners, did just that. They forked it.
I like LibreOffice very much, have donated to them and will continue to use it. That includes Collabora on my Nextcloud server.
But I have to agree that for a serious alternative to MS, OnlyOffice, and now Euro Office is much better suited.
IMHO LibreOffice shot itself in the foot for ignoring the demand for online office. Collabora bravely carried the torch, but strictly from the users perspective, the browser based version is not all that. And apparently, due to the architecture of Libre, this not something that is easily fixed.

OOXML vs ODF
So it makes sense for Nextcloud to prefer EuroOffice as the office engine. They deal with customers. The ODF support however is currently sub-par. So they kind of have no choice to for now make that the default. They have said that one of the things they are committed to is to improve ODF support. It is just too early for that.

Sovereignty
If you are not from Europe you may not realise how serious the move to be less dependent on the US (or other non EU powers) is. This is not a boycot or anti US, we've had a wake up call that we currently are way too dependent. US tech is not blacklisted. We just have become cautious to become too dependent and require real exit options.
When it comes to digital sovereignty it is not just the attitude of the current US administration, but also what happened to VMWare after the Broadcom takeover, MS price increases and increasingly enshitification. People that just a few years ago would blindly gulp of everything MS and the likes offered, thought that concepts of vendor lockin was just stupid hippie talk, are now actively looking for alternatives.

So in my opinion
I have to agree with Nextcloud / Euro Office to choose OOXML for now. I hope that in stead of finger pointing to Euro Office and Collabora, the document foundations focuses on improving the online Libre Office.

Actually Google' s own announcement does mention: Laptop ready: Small enough to run locally with just 16GB of VRAM or unified memory.

On a laptop 16 gb of vram is not very common, but unified memory on Macs is

These days many people seem to forget that desktops still exist ;-(

Oh James, now I know why you have 6 fingersâ¦.

pip install blood?

IANAL but It is the assumption of OnlyOffice that there is a violation. EuroOffice in commit message on Github

Apparently AGPLv3 allows some additions in Section 7. What is allowed is defined in a-f. OnlyOffice feels that 7-b allows them to demand that the attribution means that they can demand the Logo and brand elements need to stay. Euro-Office apparently disagrees.
Euro-Office also claims that 7e gives no legal basis for it.

I can't assess who is right.

As to why OnlyOffice over Collabora. In my experience, as OnlyOffice uses the OOXML format of MS, there are a few less issues with MS Office files. In my experience there are indeed a few less lay-out issues. Another thing I once notices was embedded media files in a Powerpoint file that did work in OnlyOffice and not in Libre.

Although OnlyOffice is now officially based in the EU, there remains some doubts on them as they originated in Russia.

If Oracle were to sue Oracle, will that create a black hole?

it's weather balloon radiation

if OpenAI gets to train on Oracles internal documents, you'll get one hell of a lawyer

The feature of Onlyoffice is that it uses MS format (docx etc.) as the default file format. In my experience this does result in OnlyOffice being more compatible with MS Office files. I've seen it be better in layout, as well as media embedded in i.e. ppptx.
So it makes sense in that you get a lot less blow back from users that could care less about sovereignty. I personally have been mainly using LibreOffice and its predecessors all the way back to StarOffice so I do prefer Libreoffice, but if you have to support many users...

Unfortunately there is some controversy on the company behind OnlyOffice and its Russion origins. They are now registered in Latvia, but there still seem to be close ties to Russia.
It is open source though, would be nice if it would be forked by a less controversial party.

a this is the classic Slashdot for which I keep coming back. When the topic is tech, we make car analogies. When the topic is cars, we switch to tech.

Safer?

I live in the EU and am very much pro EU. But the way it is implemented in my view does not make it safer.

I recently bought a new car that has this. The biggest gripe I have with it is that by law the warnings go off at exactly the speed limit. I, like most drivers here, usually drive a little faster. For one the speed that your car indicates is usually higher than it really is. But also when passing a car you're supposed to this with a significant speed difference. So the result is I obviously turn it off and do that every time. Now this can only be done by going in the menu, a menu I cannot access until the car is properly booted which takes some time since it insists on a welcome screen and wishing me a good morning. So I end up doing this when I'm already driving.
The result: I don't use it and end up fiddling in the menus while driving. And I think most people do this as well.
Also in my country the cars cannot always know the exact speed limit. We have a lot of locations on the highway with a 90kph sign only for when the road is wet. We also currently have that between 19:00h and 6:00h the speed limit on the highway on large areas is higher than during the day. My brand new car cannot handle that.

It would be a lot better if:
- you could set the threshold (i.e. 10%)
- turn of the warning on the steering wheel (for situations where you for a short time deliberately go a bit faster, i.e. passing on the high way)
- you could disable it with one button.

You do need t have to worry about me touching your Bud, or any for that matterâ¦.

Very nice to see DSL restarting as a project. Back in the day I used it a lot. It was quite easy to roll your own version of it. I did that quite a lot. There was a very nice feature which I think was called frugal install. This allowed you to install it to HD and boot in a similar way as the CD or USB stick would boot. So effectively boot from a read-only filesystem. For instance interesting for some system used in a public setting where it is an important feature that after a reboot it is 'clean' again. Also it could be loaded completely into memory (provided you had enough)

Recently I was looking in to doing similar and, as DSL was no longer active, I created scripts that allow you to create your own custom .iso based on Debian. They work, can be found here: https://gitlab.com/customlivecd/customlivecd . So I know from experience what a challenge it is to create such a thing at around 700 mb. A basic system will quickly go over 1GB

From DSL I did copy the concept of Frugal install as well, so you can create your own custom (personalized) .iso that you can install to i.e. an SSD. I also added the option to encrypt your home dir.

What I am trying to get to work now is to include the use of a Yubikey (or other u2f device). However pamu2fcfg seems to not be chroot safe. After booting from an .iso where I enrolled a Yubikey during the creation the key isn't found.

So in all, I am happy to see DSL reactivated. Will definitely play around with it