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?
Doesn’t help that every nextcloud official announcement promises the moon while delivering not even stardust.
Example: this blog post from two years ago: https://nextcloud.com/blog/plan-your-next-trip-with-nextcloud-maps-new-features/
None of the features written in that post are available, even today
It’s something that it might be coming in a decade if someone is inspired by the mockups and codes it. When you install the maps plugin it shows a map of the world, and that’s it.
If they need to announce a concept that only exists as a mockup, either publish the news on April 1st or write “concept of how maps might integrate with nextcloud 50”
Well, every project ends up finding things that aren’t as easy as they may have thought, or chooses after the fact to devote the time to other things. I could cherry pick decade old features from every long-lived project, like KDE or Gnome and say that makes them worthless. They patently aren’t worthless, and anyone that wants to criticize is welcome to file a bug and follow through on the fix. Most bugs don’t get fixed because people won’t follow up.
I’m happy with where they’ve gone overall, it fits a lot of my needs that I’d have to use something like Google or Microsoft instead, so it’s annoying as shit to see every person that can’t be arsed to put in the time to get it working properly for the things it does well to shit on it every. goddamn. time. it’s. name. shows. up gets on my last nerve.
I’m using nextcloud and I like it (also I don’t see all this slowness even if I run it on a core i3 8100) but it’s the general stance from the devs
Everything it’s announced like it’s ready to the public when it’s just a proof of concept (not even alpha)
Another example is the mail plugin. It’s an unusable early alpha yet on the blog there are three posts starting from four years ago talking about inexistent features https://nextcloud.com/?s=Mail&wpessid=1612
Same for the forms plugin. Early alpha that doesn’t have an essential feature like emailing responses to specific addresses (it sends notifications via nextcloud). Again the blog talks 4 years ago like it’s ready for everyone.
Or the Trello clone. Many problems like it “ruins” the tasks sync by creating read-only tasks that get synced via caldav.
Or nextcloud photos, big post in 2022 but it’s very barebone
Or docs, so many posts yet it has so many problems.
Or the desktop client, where builds are pushed to regular users without testing the installer script (forced reboots without confirmation, crashing explorer.exe instead of asking a graceful restart)
The only NC plugin that I’m using without problems and that I feel it passed the beta stage is Music and its subsonic compatible server. No blog posts about it. Maybe because it’s hosted on owncloud GitHub repository
On the plugins, I couldn’t say, I’ve not used those plugins. I do use ones like Gpoddersync, Recipes and Snappymail with no issues. I did try that Forms plugin and it was a bag of shit. Never had issues with the client, but I’ve only used it on Windows once, every other system its on is Linux, but it’s been solid.
In the Docker All-in-One, the Collabra Suite integration is flawless and I have several people using it on my server. Performance is snappy, especially with a few recent updates. I highly recommend the AIO, after having used NC in baremetal, NextcloudPi, Docker, it’s the least maintenance and best update experience by far.
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.
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!
Performance is why I stopped using it and replaced it with Radicale for card- and CalDAV and Syncthing for filesyncing. Couldn’t be happier with the results.
Syncthing is fantastic. Loving it so far.
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.
I like Nextcloud very much but this release (and the one before it) are really enterprise focused for which I don’t have a use case…
But there customers do
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.
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.
A newbie should be running AIO in docker, which in my experience, has been pretty solid.
Blames PHP for all the issues
This new release does seem to solve some long standing issues people have had with nextcloud for a while. Like great performance improvements and Federated Chat with Nextcloud Talk.
And improving Circles and renaming it to Teams seems like it’s only gonna be really useful for Businesses. But I do hope that some smaller organizations can get some use out of it.
All in all, I think this release is great, if what they said in the announcement is true. I don’t care much for all the AI additions, but I understand why they are doing it.
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
I used nextcloud for many years. I failed to see significant improvements overall and it has always been slow and clunky.
I have replaced with radicale, a WebDAV server, syncthing and little more.
Over the years I tried lots of plugins and never settled with any, always too barebone or mild.
Still an amazing tool, if it fits your use case.