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Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

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Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#201

Post by hommelix »

nolok wrote: post #22
zerof1l wrote: post #18

I've been using Nextcloud for some years now. Overall it's an ok replacement for Google Cloud. But for some time now their focus has been on developing features for business collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones. For example, their photo library is quite limited. There's Memories app for Nextcluod, but it isn't much better. I'm in the process of migrating to Immich. Nextcluod notes app on Android has bee…

As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet. I have a synology nas and I use the synology photos app for auto uploading without loss of quality to my nas. Don't forget any picture or videos, deduplicate, figure out what you can safely delete from my phone,... All of that works great and is reliable. The synology photos app to watch your photos though, isn't very g…

> As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet. > > The synology photos app (...) > Next cloud (...) > Immich (...) > Photoprism (...) > > Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?

What about Piwigo ? They have a mobile client in F-Droid. I've not used it myself, but a friend is happy hosting his own photo gallery with it.

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#202

Post by jraph »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #93

Nextcloud is a nightmare. First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Its internals are a shitshow - a question about getting the real IP of the calling client raised a 10 pages discussion where people said "it works" and other days "it does not". The "solution" required you to change a volatile setting within the docker container (and do it again when the container ch…

Seeing this top comment is sad.

I handle several nextcloud instances, one of them updated from owncloud, I'm very happy, it does a lot of stuff well and when you need specialized software you can because it's just files. Updates have been painless.

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#203

Post by ruph123 »

akvadrako wrote: post #156
ruph123 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run my own nextcloud server now for over 5 years. There are some frustrations like the photo app which is uselessly slow. But for the files sync, contacts/calendar and some other apps it works well. It _does_ offer a million different things and some of those are half baked but the core functionality (a dropbox-like file storage) is decent in my experience. Updates have never been an issue. And honestly I am always…

The file syncing is not very good either. It's based off WebDAV and very slow. If you only have a few files it's workable, but it isn't competitive with Dropbox, SyncThing or any of the popular alternatives.

It is also workable if you have more than just a few files. I sync several GB of data, books, papers, notes, photos, videos, etc. Constantly changing and it has been pretty fast. Webdav is just the interface used for external services that support the protocol. Which may not be the best tech but it certainly is supported by many, many apps and services. I cannot connect a random e.g. pdf reading app with Syncthing and maybe not with Nextcloud directly but certainly via webdav.

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#204

Post by teruakohatu »

remram wrote: post #144
teruakohatu wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to like it but it’s quasi-open source. As far as I understand, from the convoluted FAQ, paid Essentials members can’t access the source code, and they are gatekeeping some quite basic features behind Essentials membership. Reading between the lines I think it is closer to dual licensed. With extra conditions for the non-public source.

Which features are you missing in the open source version?

User roles for example. They even call the plan “essentials”.

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#205

Post by donmcronald »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #93

Nextcloud is a nightmare. First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Its internals are a shitshow - a question about getting the real IP of the calling client raised a 10 pages discussion where people said "it works" and other days "it does not". The "solution" required you to change a volatile setting within the docker container (and do it again when the container ch…

> Finally the upgrade is insane.

Wait until you see the "solution" for dealing with the client mangling timestamps [1]. After you've been burned by server updates, and then burned by client updates, with solutions that push the problems onto the system admin, you start to wonder if using it in the first place was a mistake.

IIRC, part of the reason they forked was because OwnCloud wasn't moving fast enough. My experience makes me think OwnCloud might have been right.

1. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-err...

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#206

Post by kkfx »

ezst wrote: post #19
kkfx wrote: post #5

Honestly I do not favor this paradigm, no matter if NextCloud, O360, SandStorm and alike: the point is that we should teach the desktop paradigm, syncing data around, not using desktops as monsters, hyper-expensive thin clients or more properly dumb terminals of a remote "mainframe". It's easy today because current IT evolution is totally skewed, derailed for commercial reasons, but that's untenable. Who think it's n…

> Honestly I do not favor this paradigm I think you are not alone, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this frog is boiled so slow that our opinion eventually becomes irrelevant: today's teenagers are *less* proficient on a keyboard than their elders, because they no longer "type" but "tap" instead. When the average exposure to computing is reduced to dumbed-down "consumption-only" devices running iOS/Android, and th…

I definitely follow you but noting a thing: the more we "advance" the more we implement again very old solutions, back for the pioneering Xerox PARC era, some random examples:

- most UIs actually have switched from the "commercial menu" model to a "search&narrow" one, now are kind of very rudimentary CLIs;

- from "commercial widget-based GUIs" back to some kind of DocUIs, today they are web, back than PostScript and alike, but the idea is essentially the same;

- NotebookUIs (like Jupyter, IDEs like R-Studio where some "GUI elements exists mixed with text) are more and more common and well, tomorrow someone will rediscover Emacs buffers ideas...

So, while most computer users are consumer only, those who can't consume only a little step at a time, following a kind-of Greenspun's tenth rule reimplement partially and with many bugs and limits old ideas. I do not know where we could go in 10+ years, but... Even with all the bug-ridden modern overhead, we actually rediscover classic solutions, at a certain point classic desktop computing will came back forcibly IMVHO...What I do not know it's how much time and injuries we will suffer in between...

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#207

Post by rustcleaner »

donmcronald wrote: post #190
thowawatp302 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did you do that when the instructions say not to?

I don't understand why this attitude is so prevalent in the tech industry. The person writing the upgrade script knows if upgrades can't support n+2 jumps and it takes about 30s to build in a check: if(target_version > current_version + 1) // not allowed It's more work to add it to the docs than it is to put a fail-fast check in the upgrade script, so why put it in the docs where 250k+ admins need to be aware of the…

It's to sit at the top of the tower smugly. I know because truthfully I enjoy it myself from time to time, we all do in our own little ways. :^)

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#208

Post by rustcleaner »

stavros wrote: post #191
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously do you think that for software that manages data the proper way is for someone who starts the upgrade process to say "this is not supported, and now we fucked up your database and you cannot recover from that"? They knew that I was upgrading N+2, this is not a surprise - and I did not realize that upgrading N+2 is not supported. The proper way would be to abort the upgrade upon discovering that I am going f…

I don't understand how commenters here can seriously argue this. There should be no UX for "oh this is not supported? Eh give it a shot anyway, I don't care about literally all my files". If you don't support upgrading, don't expose that in the UI. There's no excuse for having UI that will let the user do something unsupported and then screw up their data.

Not saying it's the case here, but I wonder how much deniably malicious incompetence out there gets covertly injected into projects by competitors.

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#209

Post by bo0tzz »

Ringz wrote: post #57
nolok wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV but any issue you have with Immich that may lead you to migrate to NCM you will find again there,IMHO. Update are easier but lots of other stuff are very much work in progress, even when it works well. My criteria is "when I want to show my vacation to X on the TV at a dinner 6 to 12 months after setup is it reliable or does it always need some tweak or whatever and ruin the moment". I dont know the apple ecosys…

I would like to switch to Immich, but it is still unclear to me whether my existing directory structure will be preserved or not. In the beginning, Immich used his own structure, which is a no go for any photographer.

Immich supports customizing the folder structure[1] or using an external directory[2].

[1]: https://immich.app/docs/administration/storage-template

[2]: https://immich.app/docs/features/libraries

Re: Nextcloud: Open-Source Cloud Apps

#210

Post by KronisLV »

TheChaplain wrote: post #116
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #93

Nextcloud is a nightmare. First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Its internals are a shitshow - a question about getting the real IP of the calling client raised a 10 pages discussion where people said "it works" and other days "it does not". The "solution" required you to change a volatile setting within the docker container (and do it again when the container ch…

I've run Nextcloud for almost 3 years now via docker on a vps , it hosts my contacts, calendars and files. There is a apache reverse proxy in front of it, and a postgresql-database in the back. Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new updated images. Occasionally it whines about missing indices, but that is easily fixed using the occ command line tool. The clients real IP is forwarded by the proxy.…

I had version 17 installed, I wanted to upgrade to version 20.

I launched the container for the new version, but got an error: "Exception: Updates between multiple major versions and downgrades are unsupported."

I then tried launching the container for version 18, which should be supported, which initially seemed to succeed! However, I was greeted by "Internal Server Error" in the web UI, since apparently instead of just quitting, the initial upgrade had ruined the DB schema.

After restoring version 17 from backup, migrating to 18 and onwards, then trying to register my local apps with it, I then got CSP errors in the console when signing in. After manually editing the configuration file (which you seemingly can't do through environment variables) that seemed to be resolved.

Then, I tried syncing my local files but realized that the size of all of them is suddenly 0 KB. The files would show up in the web UI, but the size would be 0 KB. I had to rename the files a few times, which eventually fixed that, no matter how odd.

Finally, I realized that trying to open any of the pages in the web UI would take around 3-10 seconds. It seemed that there was a bug in the Talk application, disabling which then gave me the expected performance, even if it affecting how the Files application works also seems odd.

I like the utility Nextcloud provides me, but despise updating it. At this point I just stick to the core apps and wipe the whole thing when I need to update to something newer, manually carrying over the files I want to sync in the new instance.

Oh, also, out of the box the DB file locking configuration causes large file uploads (a few GB) to just hang, in a way where I cannot delete them. I had to disable locking altogether.

Honestly, it's just weird. If you need 1000 SQL migrations to go from version 1 of your software to version 20, just include all of them and don't mess around with disallowing migrating across multiple major versions. Same for any changes that might impact the persisted files on the FS. Just have updates be one continuous, long stream of patches, applied sequentially. If you do that and have sane defaults, you're good.

To not be overly negative: it's good that Nextcloud exists, is free, has a somewhat nice ecosystem around it and both the desktop apps and the phone apps for iOS/Android are okay.

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