Is Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Experts?

[Tom_Forge]

I am not asking this question to start a flame war. I am not attempting to dictate another’s policies. However, I am interested in discussing the scope of Nextcloud support in a civil and constructive manner. I would go so far as to say it’s a very important question for Nextcloud to revisit from time to time.

I will bring this up in the context of my issue, but my motivation is not to solve 1 problem I am having. It is to find out if I will have meaningful support should I have a 2nd problem two months from now.

My story starts with my search for a slick way to “Access, share and protect your files, calendars, contacts, communication & more at home and in your enterprise,” as stated on the Nextcloud homepage. [Asterisks added for emphasis – not for shouting.] From there I looked at the support page and options and visited Youtube for some reviews and interviews with some of the Nextcloud developers. Based on the information I was coming across, Nextcloud was presented as something that could be a little tricky to get installed but you didn’t have to be a LAMP expert to install or maintain because there would be community support available to help competent computer users.

I looked at the paid support option and found Basic Enterprise support is 1900 Euros a year and it goes up from there. I assumed that when Nextcloud said that it is for the “home” it did not expect its run-of-the-mill home users to pay 1900 a year? Please let me know if that is an unfair assumption.

The ordinary home user was primarily looking at documentation, these forums, and social media for support – at least that’s what I garnered from consulting the nextcloud.com/support page.

I decided to try out Nextcloud and built a nice little home server with a ne 4tb HD, and 8gb of RAM. I installed my distro of choice, Linux Mint 18.2 on it and with that fresh install, after setting up a Mumble server I started tackling Nextcloud. I had some installations issues with it. I tried the Snap installation and it worked but I was worried that any advice I got to tweak Apache, MySQL, or even PHP would have to be interpreted for use with the Snap. I didn’t feel Snap was going to be as well supported as a traditional install. So I removed the Snap and started over. Even then I had a couple of issues, but by going over the installation instructions a bit more carefully and consulting YT I figured out the step I had overlooked.

After installation I basically have two known issues left: (1) getting the self-SSL certificate to work; and (2) Nextcloud telling me to move my data to protect it. (The third claim in access, share, and protect is protect and that’s really important to me because I would like to have my tax records and financial files stored on the Nextcloud server.) So I consulted the online documentation which did not provide a solution to move the user files out of the web root folder/subfolder structure. So I visited these forums and found a thread that discussed the issue and there was a myriad of advice on how to do it. All the advice was from folks way above my skill set level so there isn’t really a good way for me to discern, in a timely manner, which advice to follow in a timely manner. Plus, forums being what they are some of the information may not have been relevant to a 12.0.0 given the heavy development being done with Nextcloud.

So, on July 29th, 2017 I asked for help in the thread I found with some followup questions. Four days went by without any response. and I started a new thread and asked for the same help. I am patient and happy to have waited three days or so to see if a user would come along and help out. I completely understand that the user community just may not have had the time or inclination to help in my case. What baffles me is that nobody from Nextcloud itself seems to be around to pick up the pieces when the user community hasn’t attempted to help one of its newcomers?

As of this writing, seventeen days have passed since I asked for help. So I am wondering if in reality Nextcloud is not a solution for home users unless the home user is an experienced Apache website administrator, a pretty serious hacker, or working towards becoming a serious hacker? I have dabbled in computers and programming, off and on, since having a Radio Shack TRS-80 in the 80s. I am not a hacker but I know my way around a PC and I certainly can follow step-by-step terminal instructions. So maybe Nextcloud is not supported well enough for persons in my situation to become users? I don’t say that to be accusatory, if Nextcloud is for veteran LAMP users only – that’s perfectly fine – I have no complaint.

I am just confused because I have seen interviews with some of the developers and other tech folks and they present that Nextcloud is both a “home” and enterprise solution to get away from entrusting your data to cloud services. Yet that “home” claim is pretty thin if there is no meaningful support option for homes that have competent computer users in them.

So I offer this suggestion. Nextcloud should consider qualifying “home” use more up front or do something to make their claim more realistic by providing reasonably priced home support or having some folks on the payroll that primarily work with helping folks that the user community did not get to in a timely manner, say 48 hours or so. Also, a support wiki that is version conscience would also help.

For those that have worked on Nextcloud, even if I don’t end up using it, you still have my thanks because this is an important privacy and freedom project that the business community needs. I wish Nextcloud success in its business model and promoting and developing freedom software.

[tflidd]

Thank you for your remarks. It’s true that there is currently only the forum for home user support. Here you find other users who help you in their free time (the developers are here from time to time but they don’t deal with basic questions).

To run a server on your own, you need to have (or learn) some basic knowledge. The problem with guides and howtos is that there is a huge diversity of devices and systems. Some choices are up to your personal preference, your usage, other considerations are linked to your environment. So there can’t be a guide that fits all and unfortunately there is no solution that works out of the box (the Nextcloud box should somehow).

If you don’t want to deal with a server, you can use one of the Nextcloud providers: https://nextcloud.com/providers/ But then you don’t have control over all you data…

@Tom_Forge

So I offer this suggestion. Nextcloud should consider qualifying “home” use more up front or do something to make their claim more realistic by providing reasonably priced home support or having some folks on the payroll that primarily work with helping folks that the user community did not get to in a timely manner, say 48 hours or so. Also, a support wiki that is version conscience would also help

I often thought about such options. If you guarantee a support by Nextcloud, what about all the volunteers which do their job for free? Many problems on the user side are not related to Nextcloud itself, it’s the environment (admin panels), home network (port forwarding), domains and certificates. It’s hard for staff to know all that. And finally, you need to sell a lot of support to hire somebody.

In you personal experience you went already quite far. Real certificates are a big advantage if you connect clients and with some dyndns providers it should be possible to get a hostname that can be use with letsencrypt which gives you free certs. For really critical data, check if you need to put them on a cloud device. And if you do, use additional client-side encryption (e.g. VeraCrypt).

[JasonBayton]

Hey,

You’re right, the NC devs don’t spend all of their time around here, and when they do they’re likely responding to something specific in one of the hundreds of mentions they get weekly. They are however very active on GitHub which is their day-to-day hangout given that’s where development and bug squashing is taking place.

There’s a distinction between “how do I install this properly” and “this isn’t working as expected” - the former is redirected to the community while the latter may be debugged here on the forum, but ultimately goes to GitHub to be properly tracked and resolved. If the devs were to spend more time here troubleshooting installation problems and general how-to questions, 12.0.1 likely wouldn’t be out for several more months.

Where your gripes come in, I guess, is that you’ve got issues there’s possibly 20-30+ topics discussing already and resolutions should be available (I’m assuming really as I didn’t catch your earlier topics), but it’s not so much a bug as an installation problem and therefore the community should be more than capable of resolving this; some of us have even written end-to-end guides like myself and @riegerCLOUD.

Not everyone in the community is here to try to resolve issues, which means there are fewer power users who get online when they can to help; though plenty we are, timezones, work and other life tasks that pay the bills get in the way (hence my seeing this now and not hours ago when it was posted), but it’s all free and if you’re proactive about your issue (posting and waiting days for example won’t get you far - judging by the amount of new topics that come in daily yours will get lost in hours, nevermind days) - by which I mean a couple of bumps to bring it back up to the top now and then (again making new topics, not the way to do this) will usually get someone’s attention.

To target some comments specifically:

@Tom_Forge

So I consulted the online documentation which did not provide a solution to move the user files out of the web root folder/subfolder structure. So I visited these forums and found a thread that discussed the issue and there was a myriad of advice on how to do it. All the advice was from folks way above my skill set level so there isn’t really a good way for me to discern, in a timely manner, which advice to follow in a timely manner.

These topics?

HowTo: Change / Move data directory after installation

Snap/Docker/VM users click here!

Note that this HowTo does not apply to Nextcloud containers/appliances or the official Nextcloud VM from <a href="https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/" rel="noopener nofollow ugc">Hansson IT</a>. If you use Nextcloud Snap, follow their official simple instructions: <a href="https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap/wiki/Change-data-directory-to-use-another-disk-partition" class="inline-onebox">Change …

Is there a safe and reliable way to move data directory out of web root?

My installation seems to be working well, now I want to do a little bit to secure it. I have Nextcloud 10 on Ubuntu 16.04. It seems like the first thing I should do is move my data directory out of web root. I SO don’t want to break my installation. Is there a good tutorial on how to accomplish this and verify once complete that Nextcloud is still functioning properly? Thanks, and I have to say, I’ve been playing around with it and it’s fantastic, doing exactly what I was hoping.

There’d be nothing to stop you asking for the info provided to be simplified, @MichaIng would I’m sure love to incorporate that feedback into his guide if he was told, thus helping more people.

@Tom_Forge

I tried the Snap installation and it worked but I was worried that any advice I got to tweak Apache, MySQL, or even PHP would have to be interpreted for use with the Snap.

It’s not even a question of interpreting to be fair, the snap is read-only, meaning you can’t edit pretty much anything; this is mentioned in several topics (and by me many times). This is by design though, so as a new user you run a few commands and the snap runs autonomously… it’s the very point of the Nextcloud Box.

@Tom_Forge

Nextcloud itself seems to be around to pick up the pieces when the user community hasn’t attempted to help one of its newcomers?

See above, I guess. To add, on average we see >200 new topics a week, even if the small(ish) NC team did spend more time here picking up tickets, they couldn’t be expected to keep up with that pace.

@Tom_Forge

So I am wondering if in reality Nextcloud is not a solution for home users unless the home user is an experienced Apache website administrator, a pretty serious hacker, or working towards becoming a serious hacker?

Yes and no, experience helps but I’d refer back to the guides; plus should your topic(s) get picked up in the forum you’ll generally get step by steps there too. It’s worth keeping an open mind to the “home” definition too, the many thousands of installations on home networks is more than enough for NC to push it as a solution available for home users.

@Tom_Forge

Nextcloud should consider qualifying “home” use more up front or do something to make their claim more realistic by providing reasonably priced home support or having some folks on the payroll that primarily work with helping folks that the user community did not get to in a timely manner, say 48 hours or so.

Good suggestions. More about this is discussed here:

Support Cycle / Number of maintained versions

To get things clear: you mean, that with a support contract we could (if it goes the the way you think it should go) stay on e.g. NC 11 and you (the company I purchased the support contract from) would provide us with security-updates for that release for e.g. 10 years?

@Tom_Forge

Also, a support wiki that is version conscience would also help

Are you referring to the howto category with the relevant FAQs and such, or the official documentation? Because the latter certainly is version specific.

[MichaIng]

@Tom_Forge I agree with you in many points. When I review the topics here I opened to get support or ask a question, many of them stayed unanswered, sometimes others with the same issue join, but without solution/answer for then, and sometimes it took a while, or until I push the topic up by some new information/research by me on the topic. It highly depends though, some app developers e.g. are highly active to help out on questions about their apps.

But I guess that is not unusual for community based support forums. Entering questions/issues into G***le, I quite often find those without any answer for years . I guess in general just a few users also offer help and share their experience in relation to those, who ask for support. To be true: help.nextcloud.com is the first forum I also watch to help .

tflidd already pointed out one of the most important reasons, why it is difficult to have paid support here: Most questions/issues are not (or not only) nextcloud related. And the extremely wide range of individual server setups makes it difficult to reliably identify every issue in a reasonable time. Thus this kind of support will be too few or too expensive again. And yeah, the mixture of free helping community members and paid support for the same task always brings the risk of difficulties. But still this is an interesting topic to think about.

Best way to find a solution for now:

@JasonBayton

and if you’re proactive about your issue (posting and waiting days for example won’t get you far - judging by the amount of new topics that come in daily yours will get lost in hours, nevermind days) - by which I mean a couple of bumps to bring it back up to the top now and then (again making new topics, not the way to do this) will usually get someone’s attention.

Especially use search machines, the admin manual and of course the server (logs) itself, to research the issue by yourself while waiting for an reply. If you come further/found additional perhaps useful information, provide it on the topic to also push in back to the top.
If I have some spare time to offer some support here, sitting in the train or what, I am looking for the topics sorted by date/time, and often don’t come further than 1 day, to see where I can help out with some experience or ask for additional helpful log information e.g… As the last weeks I was totally absorbed by private stuff, family events and study, I missed your topic/s indeed .

Jason already linked the right topics. I started the guide to sum up all the info/steps for data moving. If you have questions about it, steps are missing or something is wrong/not working. I am thankful for every input to make the guide most useful.

@Nextcloud Box/Snap: Yeah I totally agree that it is not as easy as the first look implies. For my impression the easiest solution is still a really common LAMP setup with most usual Linux distribution (e.g. ubuntu server), so that for every part (distribution, webserver, database and mod_php) you find most support/answers on G***le and also here.

Ah about that certificate thing: Did you solve that already? I highly recommend to just use letsencrypt/certbot via distribution package. For apache and nginx there are official packages that provide nearly all the setup automatically, including webserver security hardening. DynDNS service and port forwarding should be there of course.

[Tom_Forge]

tflidd: Thank you for your reply!

@tflidd

To run a server on your own, you need to have (or learn) some basic knowledge. The problem with guides and howtos is that there is a huge diversity of devices and systems.

Point taken. And if I may say so, I happen to think that goes a bit towards deepening my question which is “Is Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Experts?” Certainly, if writing a guide is befuddling to the experts due to complexities then imagine the home enthusiast who has to ad hoc come up with his or her own guide – as it were. Due to the very complexity you refer to, in my mind, in order for Nextcloud to be forthright in its foremost statement about home use, Nextcloud should figure out how to deliver support in a timely manner (granted no small task). Or, IMO, Nextcloud should own that installing and maintaining the product is for LAMP experts only. I don’t have a problem with either course and support Nextcloud making a choice either way. I would, however, ask that the company evaluate whether or not the product is truly suited for use by home users. I would venture it is, if supported.

@tflidd

I often thought about such options. If you guarantee a support by Nextcloud, what about all the volunteers which do their job for free?

That’s a very good question. I can see how that may dry up volunteer support. There are ways to reward folks beyond money. You could have a stackoverflow / ubuntu style vote as to “helpful” or “solved” and those points can be used for unobtrusive advertising credits to be placed on federated installations that voluntarily support community supporters. So even if you have a volunteer that doesn’t have a business they could put up an advertisement (anon if they want to) for their favorite charity. The only ads that come through are those paid for with community support advertising credits. That’s just one idea and it may not be right for this community but there are ways of rewarding community volunteers.

@tflidd

Some choices are up to your personal preference, your usage, other considerations are linked to your environment.

Well to help everyone with that Nextcloud could setup an intake for support so a lot of those issues would be one click away for anyone trying to help. But yes, again, I think that sort of makes my point of how tricky this all is for the home user.

@tflidd

you need to sell a lot of support to hire somebody

Agreed, but 1 or 2 hires would go a long way to address home user support don’t you think? Even if they focused on creating a curriculum to bring home users up to speed, that might be very helpful. A video lecture series done on Youtube or other video site would help. If your home users need to understand Apache theory either find a set of focused lessons and get that into a playlist with Nextcloud follow on commentary or Nextcloud could produce the content itself.

@tflidd

In you personal experience you went already quite far.

Thank you. I think I will be reinstalling after I get my support questions answered, but the thing is I really dread the thought of investing weeks of effort only to have some sort of update come along in Linux or Nextcloud that buggers the whole thing up and I really can’t get the assistance needed to sort out issues. This comes with all software I suppose but generally speaking I have had a pretty darn good experience with Linux Mint, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, Inkscape, Blender, etc as far as those things “just working”.

In terms of LAMP, I see that as comparatively fussy and obscure. I’ve done installed LAMP several times after my first install of Linux just a couple of years ago. But I haven’t really used LAMP in even a “home production” environment because it’s quite a commitment of knowledge to know all of that stuff just for home purposes. I mean if that’s your livelihood or foremost hobby then it is something you will be happy to dedicate a lot time to each and every month. I am more of in the class of getting it up and running and follow security and upgrade bulletins and then get back to my livelihood and my favorite pastimes. Honestly, I think that’s how most home users of Nextcloud should be viewed if Nextcloud wants to really change free the masses from cloud services. That is to say, if Nextcloud users must be LAMP experts then Nextcloud’s social impact is going to suffer. IMO anyway.

All that being said, I really don’t want to come across as complaining. I am just trying to have a dialog and ask Nextcloud if it wants to be there for folks like me. If Nextcloud doesn’t want to be there for folks like me, that’s absolutely fine – not everything is geared for, or should be geared for, folks like me.

[alfred]

@tflidd

And if you do, use additional client-side encryption (e.g. VeraCrypt).

Better would be Cryptomator and file-based encryption tools (not container-based ones like Veracrypt). One simple change would trigger a full resync (as long as there is no delta sync).

[Tom_Forge]

Michalng, thank you for your thoughts.

@MichaIng

Best way to find a solution for now:

I guess I’ll give the old “bump” a try. Thanks!

@MichaIng

Especially use search machines, the admin manual and of course the server (logs) itself, to research the issue by yourself while waiting for an reply.

Right and that’s sort of what I am getting at also because while I am capable of spending hours and hours tracking down a solution and eventually sorting it out, following online advice can mess up your LAMP and make matters even worse. So, it comes down to a risk vs reward analysis and I am afraid that for most home users the risk outweighs the reward because most home computer users are not wanting to invest the time required to become LAMP experts. That’s hacker and IT territory really, IMO. That’s why I think Nextcloud’s support solution for home users is key as to whether or not this is really for home use or not. Nextcloud has no obligation to be a solution for home users, except by their own words and claims and that’s really what I want to dig at.

Am I misinterpreting their promotional efforts? If not, would Nextcloud be willing to talk about this with their home users and see if anything reasonable can be done to help Nextcloud live up to what it wants to do for people? If not, then would Nextcloud do the home user the favor of not getting our hopes up with promotional materials that get us into a product that is going to require effort far in excess of what can be expected of home users (compare installing and maintaining core FOSS programs such as VLC, GIMP, etc.).

@MichaIng

As the last weeks I was totally absorbed by private stuff, family events and study, I missed your topic/s indeed .

Well I thank you for your empathy. And I do want to work on the issues that I am having but I’ll do that by bumping my request for assistance thread that I started. If you can meet me over there I’d truly appreciate it. Here though, I don’t want to solve – in the scope of things – my 2 little issues. IMO it is more important to Nextcloud to wrestle with the overall issue. Honestly, my little install isn’t that big a deal but I think Nextcloud is doing the world a great service here by providing such a wonderful tool where businesses can be in control of their own data. IMO it is sorely needed in these times and I appreciate it even if it is not going to be the solution that is reasonable for me (given my choices in life) to install and maintain.

[jpimlott]

I am not sure if it is correct to mention it here ,but I used an install from techandme.se.
They have a nextcloud VM that is all setup and working with update scripts. It took me about an hour to setup nextcloud using the included install script with SSL. They also offer paid support. A 500 gig VM was 18 dollars well worth the time to set it and have it just work.
John

[Tom_Forge]

Thanks for all the tips Jason, I’ll travel down those branches tomorrow and if I have any further troubles or needs I’ll try to update my thread with where I am at. Again thanks.

Preamble: I use “IMO” and “I believe” and that sort of stuff a lot not to be needlessly excessive and wordy but to really drive it home that I am skeptical of my own conclusions and that I am open attitude adjustments.

@JasonBayton

These topics?

Yes and no, I did do a search and you recently responded in the second topic you listed and I will be acting on that advice tomorrow. One of the things about the threads and forums is like I say, advice will not be uniform and so for someone like me I really have little basis to figure out who to ignore or who to give creedence to. This is a problem that stackoverflow and unbuntu help forums try to address with the voting system so that the most agreed upon solution floats to the top. In part, that’s why I felt I needed to post, because I just wanted to see if anyone warned me away from making a big mistake and that’s exactly what occurred but I think you would agree 17+ days with a 4 day followup is a long time to wait for help? I hope, that makes sense?

@JasonBayton

It’s not even a question of interpreting to be fair, the snap is read-only, meaning you can’t edit pretty much anything; this is mentioned in several topics (and by me many times).

I truly appreciate that you have addressed this for others and me! This, in my view, is a good place for the installation page to link directly to a wiki article explaining the drawbacks of such an installation. IMO newcomers should not be expected to dig through the forums and wade through non-consensus opinions for each choice one needs to make during installation. So for a LAMP or Linux developer, you will instantly know the advantages and disadvantages of a SNAP install. I just think it’s important for Nextcloud to keep in mind that even though a lot of home users can follow step-by-step instructions that doesn’t make us gurus that understand a lot of the consequences of what we are in the process of doing. So, that’s where I think a wiki really shines in that you can declutter things like installation instructions but then have a link to the community’s combined wisdom regarding an option.

@JasonBayton

Are you referring to the howto category with the relevant FAQs and such, or the official documentation? Because the latter certainly is version specific.

I wasn’t referring to anything that may or may not already exist. I was trying to say that if you do a wiki on say “moving data” what may be true for v10 is not true for v12. So if a wiki is started you don’t want to lose v10 helpful information ordinarily. I realize that Nextcloud needs to sort of push people along into upgrades for security fixes and to make it so the company is not overburdened with dealing with multiple versions of their product. I get that, but I am just saying that a wiki is a great collaborative tool that will help reduce questions on the forums especially if the wiki is version conscience. Again, I am not a developer but I hope that makes sense?

[tflidd]

If supports is somehow provided by the community and the benefits go to the community, that would be ok. The problem for me would be more, what if the problem is related to your router or webhoster, even the developers can’t help in some cases, is support paid as well. With some nasty problems, you can easily spend 1-2 hours, what would you charge per hour? Often the amount of money gives you already 1-2 years to run a vserver.

I see the difficulty for new users that they don’t know where to start. We have a couple of howtos on the forum you have to look for them and they are not structured. I’m not sure if some kind of structured wiki could help where articles are organized. So we could keep installation guides for some reference systems. And we can share information on shared hosters, on the forum it’s often not clear if there is no answer, if the person didn’t try hard enough or if it is just impossible. This would need a few people with knowledge to work regularly on such a thing.

[JimmyKater]

dear tom,

i followed the discussion going on here from the beginning… and it got some nices twists and tweaks.

and i understand clearly what you are referring to as i, myself, have some unanswered ‘calls’ open here and there (even on github). though i don’t think that i’m more than a noob. i am.
and though i managed to start my own nextcloud-instance and am running it since half a year or such. since i am a home-user i decided to start on a small environment. i had some raspberry 1 somewhere, found a step-by-step howto (even in my motherlanguage) and off i went.
i even tried owncloud sometime before and it was a real hazzle to get it to run… and when it did run it was like: nice. but as it is i don’t want to use it, and so i dropped it again. until nc came out.
well what i want to say… i do indeed see the struggle from nextcloud inc. to get better in setting things up, even for home-users (compared to OC they are already better by far!). and by releasing the snappy-NC they are aiming exactly at the unexperienced homeuser. the biggest struggle there is to get your own ubuntu-one-account set up (if i remember it right - and it’s not important that i think this makes no sense in many ways. but i see the idea behind it - getting it safe). and of course snappy-nc comes with some disadvantages… and of course you need to wait for the maintainers to maintain the snap (which could take a while). but that is exactly what an unexperienced home-user needs. a well maintained piece of software. which the user doesn’t need to take care of too much.

@Tom_Forge

I tried the Snap installation and it worked but I […] didn’t feel Snap was going to be as well supported as a traditional install. So I removed the Snap and started over.

and at this point YOU decided, well - that doesn’t fit my needings. and so you left the stage of being well but slow protected. knowing that from now on you’d be mostly on your own… especially in terms of being supported. of course that means heavy g**gling and using any forum that you can find.

and instead of taking the next - logical - step (like: running your first tries on your own on a light-weighted hardware like raspi) you set up a nice but not exactly home-user environment with 4tb of hd and 8 gb of ram. maybe you surpassed the point of being a home-user without noticing it yourself? as a homeuser with homeuser-needings you could have get yourself a raspi and a external hd and then use nextcloudpi - which is pretty well maintained by @nachoparker. he’s doing his best to help a slightly experienced homeuser not willing to go with the disadvantages of snappy-NC. and if you don’t want to collect experiences with that you could use a docker or vm (which more or less are maintained from outside as well, at least in my understanding) as a next step.
but in my honest opinion you maybe took too many steps at once by deciding upopn your environment. without being excatly clear about the pros and expecially the cons that might come with it. you have an experienced setup… pointing more into the direction of being a professional user. at least that’s what i think. and i hope you won’t take any harm from what i just said. i just wanted to let you know that you might have overesized your environment in comparison to your knowledge (and will to accept the cons of your decision… one if it being: waiting for technical answers)

so i don’t see the need to blame nextcould for not supporting home-users… they do take care of them.

the only thing blaming them may be: they are not really clear about which techncial setting to use for which kind of users.
unexperienced (and willing to let it run without taking too much care about the whole stuff) - snap
unexperienced (and willing to dig a bit more into the whole thing) - docker or vm
slightly experienced (and willing to learn in the small, at first) - raspi and ncpi
experienced and above - here’s the download and do whatever you want to do with it. you know how to proceed.

sincerely
jim

[jean]

Well I’m typically in the unexperienced (and willing to let it run without taking too much care about the whole stuff) - snap category. I have the Nextcloud Box. But yet, it turns out that I encounter issues that I cannot fixed by myself, and which doesn’t find much echo here either, and I’m left with a server that I don’t even know if it is still secure or not, that produces warnings that become annoying because I can’t fix them. It is quite frustrating.

@Tom_Forge worded nicely the issue:

I just think it’s important for Nextcloud to keep in mind that even though a lot of home users can follow step-by-step instructions that doesn’t make us gurus that understand a lot of the consequences of what we are in the process of doing

I idealized the fact that NC could bring everybody’s data home. Yet, the knowledge to set up a NC server, be it with the NC box is still quite advanced, relative to the general population. Note that most of the people don’t even know what is a server, a cloud or anything related. I think NC should try to find a way to include them, because they are ultimately the home users.

Maybe NC isn’t mature enough for having a much wider user base ? However I think that having more unexperienced users should be a goal. IMO it will allow a better support overall. First because they are much more such users out there than experienced sysadmin, so more user on the forum. And second, some might accumulate experience at one point and give that back to the community by answering problems they already encounter or write wiki pages on recurrent issues, etc…

For instance, to encourage unexperienced user to join, you could also propose a personal support for 1/6/12/… months for a price proportional to the server size or whatever.

[Tom_Forge]

JimmyKater:

Thanks for your informative response. I was not offended by your critique.

[quote=“JimmyKater, post:11, topic:19612”]so i don’t see the need to blame nextcould for not supporting home-users… they do take care of them.

the only thing blaming them may be: they are not really clear about which techncial setting to use for which kind of users.
[/quote]

I don’t think I was blaming anyone or as another has put it – having a “gripe”. That puts a negative connotation on the questions/issues I have been raising. I will fully own errors or bad behavior on my part. One of them being is I missed the Howto category before my original and there are a couple of items in there that answered some of my questions. Here in particular though I think I am merely discussing these issues from the standpoint of the computer enthusiast newcomer’s perspective. And the issue I mainly raise is that folks like me are going to need to interact with folks to understand and manage their Nextcloud install. Part of the reason I need that interaction is because I am not into Linux as a profession. I have a different profession that keeps me busy. So I don’t mind setting things up and tinkering on Nextcloud as time permits, but I really don’t want to spend 6 hours of hunting down non-interactive help that doesn’t explain things in a way that I can follow and-or absorb.

So I think most people are in my situation where IT, data administration, etc. is not their life’s work. So much of the non-interactive help that I have come across here so far is at the IT professional/hacker level. That is something that Nextcloud should be revisiting from time to time IMO.

@jean

I idealized the fact that NC could bring everybody’s data home… Maybe NC isn’t mature enough for having a much wider user base ? However I think that having more unexperienced users should be a goal. IMO it will allow a better support overall. First because they are much more such users out there than experienced sysadmin, so more user on the forum. And second, some might accumulate experience at one point and give that back to the community by answering problems they already encounter or write wiki pages on recurrent issues, etc…

I agree with that opinion!

[alfred]

Nextcloud is basically a web app. On the high level installing it is just as easy as installing Wordpress or the likes. Everything below has to be considered, but many things are beyond the reach of Nextcloud after all. The documentation is nice, some things/problems need more or less tweaking of settings or the database, which shouldn’t happen all to often though except for special requirements/settings.

That said, if someone wants an even easier complete package that does everything at once I think these would be two options:

http://dietpi.com/
https://yunohost.org/

[MichaIng]

@alfred

That said, if someone wants an even easier complete package that does everything at once I think these would be two options:
http://dietpi.com/

https://yunohost.org/

Not to forget NextcloudPi from ownyourbits

DietPi is a nice basis for low mem SOCs, as it is reaaaly slim (compared to Raspbian Lite), but for now the Nextcloud installation there is not too complete/lacks some features. I am working on an optimized installation script (on github), just didn’t found time to go on the last weeks: [SBC][DietPi] Optimize Nextcloud installation

But off topic…

[alfred]

Yes, there are even more, I just grabbed two popular (?) distributions. The installation is indeed a bit lacking, but I think the relevant Github issue should be mentioned too:

Issue: DietPi-Software | ownCloud/Nextcloud | Improve installation and configuration

[jospoortvliet]

I can tell you what our personal ambition is… I am certain that I speak for the vast majority of the employees (most certainly including Frank and all engineers) that we want to bring nextcloud to everybody. This isn’t “just marketing” and it never was: we really want everybody to be able to drop Dropbox. This was the prime driver behind starting the company: to earn money to pay people to make then ownCloud, now Nextcloud, better and help us achieve this goal.

But this is hard to do, of course. Not everybody can run a server and that ends up being the major barrier. We have always been discussing ways to deal with that, the Nextcloud Box was an initiative we hoped would help and we really wanted somebody to pick it up and try to built a bigger business around it. We didn’t want to do it ourselves as we felt it would distract from our real expertise to improve Nextcloud itself and built an ecosystem around it, but we’d facilitate however we can.

We have more ideas and this is frequently brainstormed among us at meetings, events or just in phone calls and chat. We hope the providers can help, for example, and our GSOC project is a step towards making the providers more prominent and bringing the “install the app, sign up and you are ready to go” experience from Dropbox to Nextcloud. And again, we don’t want to do it ourselves, we think we serve our goal best by making Nextcloud better, so we leave it to others. Luckily, there are many providers!

So if you ask “is Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Experts”, well, if you want to know the current state: I full well realize it isn’t ready for the average home user. But if you ask about what we want and work towards: then hell yeah, Nextcloud is meant for everybody. That’s what we all work our asses off for to achieve and I am certainly not talking for just myself or Frank or even just the employees in that: many in the community have sacrificed sleep and stressed out to help move Nextcloud forward. some of the folks in this thread certainly know what I’m talking about as I see them answer questions at all crazy times of the day

I don’t know if it fully answers the question but I hope it helps.

[JimmyKater]

that fully answers at least my questions and thoughts about nc. (i was looking at the direction nc was going and came to the same conclusions that you just pointed out)
thanks for making it clearer.

btw:

@jospoortvliet

drop Dropbox.

nice pun!

[Tom_Forge]

@jospoortvliet

But this is hard to do, of course. Not everybody can run a server and that ends up being the major barrier.

Given the nature of there being so many variables (distros, dependencies, packaging, etc.) I think for the time being it all comes down to support and being able to update documentation rapidly (that’s why I suggested a wiki). Anyway, most of everything worked just going right off the Ubuntu example installation from the installation guide.

Here’s an idea. You could focus Nextcloud installation support to certain options for home use and less than 10 employees only or something like that. To qualify for the free home / micro business installation support the user would have to have a distro that you have a volunteer for i.e. MrLinuxMintX.Y and MsFedoraX.Y. User must affirm that he or she will hold Nextcloud and the support volunteer harmless and be willing to follow the advice of the support volunteer (which would be directing the user through a limited number of configuration options). The max amount of free support given would be something like twice the time it would take a volunteer to install Nextcloud on his own machine. Just food for thought. No response needed.

Alternatively, if you could just find a way to track requests for help that are not responded to within 48 hours, that would probably have prevented my issues from falling though the cracks. Again, thanks to everyone at NC and the community for the hard work.

[JimmyKater]

@Tom_Forge

Alternatively, if you could just find a way to track requests for help that are not responded to within 48 hours, that would probably have prevented my issues from falling though the cracks.

i simply don’t see the need of answering every “call” within 48 hrs. this is the open source world. and as you aren’t obliged to BUY something you need to deal with the consequences of being on the free side of life. which means: it could happen that there are problems which aren’t easy to solve… and maybe stay unresolved for you personally if you aren’t ready to search hard and long for their solution.
if you don’t want to wait - PAY for your support. that’s how the game goes.
and of course you can complain that support is too expensive for a common homeuser… but as i said before: your environment isn’t typical homeuser, neither.