Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.
Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.
Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).
It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.
I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.
Agreed. Nextcloud keeps turning itself in hype mode 😑 Remember their social app and “Nextcloud joins the Fediverse!”. I think they even made that social app a recommended app for some time while it was barely usable. Not sure what the current state of the app is but I hear nothing about it I guess cause : new hypes!
Also the state of encryption is abysmal. It seems to be constantly experimental/beta. I vaguely remember them talking about launching E2EE at like nextcloud versions 16 or something, but it seems flaky even still :/
There’s also compatibility mismatch between certain versions of clients and servers. That almost cost me a bunch of files. Thank RMS I had a local copy through syncthing.
Every fucking Nextcloud post is covered with people shitting on this opensource project that is hugely popular and works well for a lot of use cases.
If you don’t like and can’t get it working right, then don’t use it. But maybe keep your bitching to yourselves so the rest of us can discuss it.
I wouldn’t call criticism of their strategic focus “shitting on” Nextcloud. It obviously still does a lot of things right or at least right enough to be useful and relevant to many people, or else we wouldn’t be discussing it. But it has its issues and many of them have been unadressed for a long time, so why shouldn’t people voice their displeasure with that?
Nobody is stopping you from discussing it. So far your only contribution to the discussion was bitching about others bitching.
If we limit the discussion to the selfhosted realm, I agree with these people bitching. Nextcloud is too bloated and slow, while not providing many benefits over individual services. You would at least expect it feature ease of use over having individual apps but nope because when you install an update, there is high chance of breakage. End to end encryption has been losing people files for years. Which is imo a big deal in “private cloud”.
I guess my point is that the “bitching” is our discussion and you and people who upvoted your comment are free to join it and perhaps provide some examples of your Nextcloud setup and why you think it’s good. I’m sure most of us will be nice and won’t tell you to keep your comments to yourself.
I am driving away from nextcloud more and more. I would be back when they get rid of php and really develop even one plugin (the so called “apps”) which isn’t just an alpha version.
I don’t see any use case for this bloated all in one monster with crap performance. Someone needs his files in a browser and overall synced. Use syncthing and something like filebrowser or filestash. Photos? Immich. Documents? Paperless. Music, Movies, e-books? Jellyfin. Collaborative Docs? Onlyoffice, cryptpad. Notes? Joplin, trillium. etc.
Yuuuup. I really don’t understand why it’s so popular. It’s bloated and overly complex. I’ve tried running an instance twice in the past few years, and both times I gave up within a week.
It did took me a week ,but I’m running one for 4years on a raspberry pi 4, it works good enough to share files and sync contacts and calendar.
It’s popular because people want this to be real, but it’s just a promise. The actual thing can’t run without crapping it’s pants. Even if you manage to run it fine, there will be an update that will break everything.
Bloat and bad performance aside, you don’t see a benefit in having a all-in-one solution that in a way acts as a drop in replacement for people wanting to switch away from the likes of Google/Apple? I certainly do.
Yes, having a dedicated app selected for each use case will likely give better results. But it also means more management. And many users don’t actually need more than basic functionality.
But yes looking at the complaints, they should look at polishing existing features first.
I know about the successful help being an alternative to apple/google. When I start degoogling (5 years ago) nextcloud was impressive. But I talk about my own experience. And nextcloud doesn’t work on their basics. Instead they’re following every hype with an alpha app which doesn’t get support when the hype ends (nextcloud social) for example.
Maybe they could fork owncloud again? Owncloud worked over years to get rid of php and released last year “infinity scale” its a single binary. You can run it nearly out of the box. And it is stable and fast. Nextcloud needs this, too.
The php part is something a newbie wouldn’t easy success with. The alternatives I recommend are all easy to install docker containers, which are simple to maintain and no worries about the next release could break everything.
Blames PHP for all the issues
I just cannot find a use case for Nextcloud. I have gone as far as installing it and sync’ing it with my LDAP for user auth and sync pictures from my phone to my NAS. All the other features are just a big ole m’eh for me.
This has just been my experience, so maybe I’m missing something that would just make it all click and make me not live without it. So far though, I’ve spun up and spun down an instance 3 times and never missed it afterwards.
I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.
Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.
Came here to say the same. The integration with Collabora is wonderful. I used FileRun and FileBrowser with OnlyOffice in the past, and the experience was totally different (a part that OnlyOffice messes with Excel/Spreadsheets pivot tables, or at least one year ago, making it impossible for people to work with them). I understand the hate, but currently, at least for me, is the closest experience to O365 .
I like it as basically a self-hosted Dropbox/GDrive for syncing and sharing. I would love for them to focus more on that (performance especially, as others have noted) instead of all the other crap they keep trying to jam into it.
Could you expand a bit more on the LDAP part? I’m thinking of rolling something like that myself but not sure if it’s worth it
I tried a couple of LDAP solutions out there; Windows Server AD, Open LDAP, Samba4 in Debian, TurnKey Solutions LDAP before finally settling on Zentyal. It has a nice to use web GUI and can work in conjunction with AD RSAT tools that I have installed in a throwaway Windows VM for when I need more granular controls the web GUI can’t do.
All my Debian VM’s and laptops connect to Zentyal AD via SSSD.
And how many users are in your ldap config?
Two users and a handful of service accounts. I use it so I have a centralized user authentication system instead of managing multiple individual user accounts.
It really is so slow it’s not study worth using unfortunately.
Syncthing and some nice caldav and you’re mostly good.
While I do love Syncthing, it solves a different set of requirements.
It works fine for me