edit: this topic is outdated and the decision in this topic is reverted. Please see for the full update here
- Nextcloud 26 will no longer support 32-bit and the upgrader will also block the upgrade to Nextcloud 26 on a 32-bit instance and show a warning.
- Support for 32-bit infrastructures will continue in Nextcloud 25, until October 2023.
- The critical bugs that made the earlier releases of Nextcloud 25 incompatible with 32-bit instances have been resolved in 25.0.2, which will be released beginning of December.
In this article we would like to share with you our reflection on how we earlier handled the deprecation of 32-bit support, and also share the next steps.
Context
The main reason that we cannot continue to support 32-bit is that we donāt test it. None of our engineers are running 32-bit engines and our automated tests also only run on 64-bit.
32-bit support has been in decline for several years thanks to the News app, Office CODE app and Matterbridge Talk not supporting it.
We donāt prioritise development efforts for 32-bit support because we donāt want to invest in infrastructures that are simply not optimal for running a Nextcloud. We strongly believe the experience of the users on your Nextcloud would be better when running a 64-bit infrastructure. Every functionality regarding the file handling works more reliably and this is the core functionality in Nextcloud.
Reflection
We reflected on the issues around 32-bit support for Nextcloud 25. We unknowingly introduced bugs into Nextcloud 25 that broke 32-bit instances and we did not provide warnings or an update blocker, but only silently removed itās compatibility from the system requirements documentation.
Not to talk it straight, but to give you the initial reasoning why this happened: internally we were already insecure about us being able to deliver solid software for 32-bit for the Nextcloud 25 release and decided to document that we recommend a 64-bit infrastructure. We were insecure about it, because as we said no testing is done by our team or by the automated tests on 32-bit infrastructure, however we (falsely) thought the risk of breaking anything for 32-bit was low. This is why we didnāt thought it was necessary yet to explicitly drop the support for 32-bit. This backfired, because we introduced breaking bugs, and as a result of our lack of decision making we also didnāt warn users or blocked the upgrade in advance.
We reflected on this and decided to fix the breaking bugs so that all of you who have this issue now have the time to upgrade and have the time to prepare for this change in requiring 64-bit in another year. We also learned that this needs to be communicated clearly before dropping the support, so no one risks breaking their instance. We are very sorry that this happened.
Next steps
- The critical bugs that made the earlier releases of Nextcloud 25 incompatible with 32-bit instances have been resolved in 25.0.2, which will be released beginning of December.
- Nextcloud 26 will officially not work on 32-bit installations. The upgrader will also block the upgrade on 32-bit instances and show a warning.
How to upgrade your hardware
There is already an awesome guide published by @just about how to upgrade your 32-bit Raspberry pi hardware. He listed all the relevant information for Raspberry Pi users including a list of recommended hardware. (You can find all documentation of the Nextcloud Pi project at docs.nextcloudpi.com/.)
If you think you are on a 32-bit system, we recommend you to double check if you really have 32-bit hardware or unknowingly already have 64-bit hardware but run 32-bit software. For example, Raspberry Piās already come with 64-bit hardware for 6 years (like the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4) but recommended to use a 32-bit image as an operating system. The 64-bit software was just not available yet or not solid enough yet. So make sure to check this! Maybe you donāt need to buy new electronics and you only need to update your operating system. For Raspberry Pi users of Piās that already support 64-bit, there is a migration guide here written by @michuvon.
Then, once you got new hardware, or upgraded your operating system, you need to do a migration of your data. For this, we have a documentation page in our admin documentation. Always make sure to make backups first!
Depending on the project that you have used to deploy Nextcloud, you may have some migration paths that are not documented in this documentation. If you have links to documentation of other images on how to migrate, then please let us know, then we will add those to this article.
All the best,
Daphne