I guess that means it’s dead, as there’s no way a corporation would pay millions to acquire a competitor just to continue developing a free alternative to their own product
I guess that means it’s dead, as there’s no way a corporation would pay millions to acquire a competitor just to continue developing a free alternative to their own product
Badly. Nextcloud is a very active project with many plugins and integrations. You can even integrate a mail system and AI image tagging, chat and video calls.
Owncloud focussed more on the enterprise sector and less on fancy features. Definitely the more stable product (but not only in the positive sense).
I tried NC recently (like 2 weeks ago) and fuck me it’s an awful piece of shit, full-stop. It broke completely 3x during initial setup, needing a container wipe and beginning from scratch each time, then I was following the official docs and the ‘status / security’ page of the admin area where it told me to do something that had no gui (so they are 100% aware anyone new has to do this but cba to throw it a fucking web page) and if you edit the config file on the machine directly, even if you stop the container, it breaks permissions (???) so you have to download it from your server, edit, and re-upload it (somehow doesn’t break permissions???). This took an hour to figure out, the doc was useless.
Then you get to the plug-in page and fuck me could this be any worse. Pick one fucking category each, guys, I don’t need to see 40% of the same available plug-ins on almost every fucking category, jesus fucking christ. Then you dive into these things and you realize how surface-level they are - a task/to-do list should have a fucking import/export function, as well as REPEATING OPTIONS fuck me sideways are you seriously taking the piss. You’ll be setting up other plug-ins and they don’t actually function at all even though they have been verified to work with your version (medical plug in, for example) and it just keeps crumbling around you the further you go. Shit, even the weather widget on the ‘home page’ will show C instead of F when you select a country during account setup that uses F, with NO OBVIOUS WAY TO CHANGE THAT. The fix? Go through your region options, pick a different country, then back to your actual. Does NOBODY EVEN TEST THIS SHIT? How are they on version SIX of their ‘hub’?! This screams alpha, not multiple-stable-releases!
Gahhhhh, fuck!
/rant
Nice rant ;)
I did never have any problems with installing it, but once or twice with upgrading. And I agree with you that the setup is complex with all the possible options and getting it to run well takes some time.
When it comes to the apps, Nextcloud is a very open system. Its easy to publish an app, and the quality of the apps varies. Some apps are abandoned and don’t work in recent versions. Personally, I would recommend to keep the number of apps low for stability and security reasons.
The update process is absolutely horrible, especially with containers.
I seriously cannot understand how this hasn’t been fixed ages ago. Upgrading is kind of important and nextcloud isn’t doing that much weird stuff that it didn’t upgrade itself.
I agree. I even had a documentation how to upgrade my instance since I keep on breaking it every time.
That was the case for me. I had a nextcloud setup with a few productivity apps (calendar, contacts, notes, some 3rd party). In one case I forgot to deactivate apps before update and it crashed. In another case I deactivated it first to find out they are partially not usable anymore after update.
Now I try it with one container app for one use case (seafile, baikal etc.).
I’ve been self-hosting since before docker and containers were a thing, and even though Nextcloud kinda pushes their container images these days, I still refuse to use them, and use the community archive releases or web installer when reconfiguring my system or setting up a new system to migrate to. Maybe it’s just Nextcloud and the other software I use, or maybe it’s just that I’m not really trying to build scalable server infrastructure with a lot of users, but I generally find that docker causes more problems than it solves, and it does my head in when I see projects that recommend containers as the primary suggested install method.
Totally agree with your assessment of the plugins/apps systems. Feels like you need to stick to official “apps” and hope they don’t get abandoned to have anything close to a good experience because even minor updates can break all the 3rd party apps because of a compatibility check, where you end up waiting for the app developer to release an “update” that only changes the version compatibility number.
Part of the problem is you don’t understand how containers work. If you need to do a ‘container wipe’ and starting from scratch, you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve been running nextcloud in k8s for years and running a few occ upgrade commands after an upgrade is annoying but not the end of the world.
Deleting a container and starting again from scratch = wipe
Yeah, exactly. If you’re starting over from scratch constantly you’re doing something wrong. Check out https://docs.docker.com/storage/ for a few options on how you should be managing your storage.
This is the only container I’ve had anywhere near the amount of trouble with, others it’s just pulling a new image or something. I’ve been doing docker for like 5 years now, NC was just awful. Shouldn’t need to nuke anything while you’re still in the initial service setup phase…