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 canāt 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 donāt know where to start. We have a couple of howtos on the forum you have to look for them and they are not structured. Iām 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 itās often not clear if there is no answer, if the person didnāt try hard enough or if it is just impossible. This would need a few people with knowledge to work regularly on such a thing.
i followed the discussion going on here from the beginningā¦ and it got some nices twists and tweaks.
and i understand clearly what you are referring to as i, myself, have some unanswered ācallsā open here and there (even on github). though i donāt think that iām 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 runā¦ and when it did run it was like: nice. but as it is i donāt want to use it, and so i dropped it again. until nc came out.
well what i want to sayā¦ 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 itās 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 disadvantagesā¦ 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 doesnāt need to take care of too much.
and at this point YOU decided, well - that doesnāt fit my needings. and so you left the stage of being well but slow protected. knowing that from now on youād be mostly on your ownā¦ 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. heās doing his best to help a slightly experienced homeuser not willing to go with the disadvantages of snappy-NC. and if you donāt 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 setupā¦ pointing more into the direction of being a professional user. at least thatās what i think. and i hope you wonāt 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 decisionā¦ one if it being: waiting for technical answers)
so i donāt see the need to blame nextcould for not supporting home-usersā¦ 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 - hereās the download and do whatever you want to do with it. you know how to proceed.
Well Iām 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 doesnāt find much echo here either, and Iām left with a server that I donāt even know if it is still secure or not, that produces warnings that become annoying because I canāt fix them. It is quite frustrating.
I just think itās important for Nextcloud to keep in mind that even though a lot of home users can follow step-by-step instructions that doesnāt 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 everybodyās 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 donāt 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 isnāt 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, etcā¦
For instance, to encourage unexperienced user to join, you could also propose a personal support for 1/6/12/ā¦ months for a price proportional to the server size or whatever.
Thanks for your informative response. I was not offended by your critique.
[quote=āJimmyKater, post:11, topic:19612ā]so i donāt see the need to blame nextcould for not supporting home-usersā¦ 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 donāt think I was blaming anyone or as another has put it ā having a āgripeā. 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 newcomerās 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 donāt mind setting things up and tinkering on Nextcloud as time permits, but I really donāt want to spend 6 hours of hunting down non-interactive help that doesnāt 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 lifeās 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.
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 shouldnāt 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:
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 didnāt found time to go on the last weeks: [SBC][DietPi] Optimize Nextcloud installation
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:
I can tell you what our personal ambition isā¦ 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 isnāt ājust marketingā 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 didnāt 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 weād 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 āinstall the app, sign up and you are ready to goā experience from Dropbox to Nextcloud. And again, we donāt 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 āis Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Expertsā, well, if you want to know the current state: I full well realize it isnāt 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. Thatās 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 Iām talking about as I see them answer questions at all crazy times of the day
I donāt know if it fully answers the question but I hope it helps.
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.
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 (thatās why I suggested a wiki). Anyway, most of everything worked just going right off the Ubuntu example installation from the installation guide.
Hereās 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.
i simply donāt see the need of answering every ācallā within 48 hrs. this is the open source world. and as you arenāt 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 arenāt easy to solveā¦ and maybe stay unresolved for you personally if you arenāt ready to search hard and long for their solution.
if you donāt want to wait - PAY for your support. thatās how the game goes.
and of course you can complain that support is too expensive for a common homeuserā¦ but as i said before: your environment isnāt typical homeuser, neither.
That falls back on the fact this is a community support hub and not an official, SLA-driven portal we all have to pay for. Also touches on the amount of topics I mentioned are created per week - itās a pretty big task to do pro-bono.
I have to strongly agree to the basic question of Tom_Forge.
I didnt read all of this subjects discussion thorougly, but I am also somebody who is of course thankful for any response I got here in this forum - and on the same time quite frustrated with the experience in needing assistance for Nextcloud so far. The problems I have certainly do not justify a 1.900 Euro Support contract - for that price, I can use Dropbox with some more features and I think even much more speed (even if there may be some disadvantages over NC).
In the form itĀ“s now, NC is a far cry from being able to drop Dropbox, though iĀ“d love to.
If it wasnĀ“t for the great support of my webhoster domainfactory,de, I would not have been able to get NC running in the first place at all. But still some problems seem to persist and it seems I have to live with them, with some errors and disfunctionalities, which is quite frustrating. And itĀ“s similar to Tom_ForgeĀ“s experience: my basic go to place is here, but sometimes I canĀ“t get any help here and I am stuck after that.
Thanks for listening. I hope nextcloud will persist and thrive, and I really would love to replace my Dropbox.
There are more asking for help than helping, so unfortunately as I mention above youāll need to be proactive about your issues and keep them updated/bumped. Even minor edits bump the topics up to the top of the list.
Imagine just having 1 person for support. With all charges, this will cost about 100 000 ā¬/$ per year (rough estimate). That the device is not getting too expensive, we charge perhaps 10ā¬/$ for support. So we need 10 000 subscriptions for one member of support, but (~1800 working hours per year) this person can only spend on average 10 minutes per subscription. 10 minutes is not much, so the devices need to be so reliable that there is very little need for support.
Currently with different OS, devices, home networks, ā¦ the risk to generate support is way too high. So it would work with a dedicated device. To reduce the influence of ISPs (there are some with carrier-grade NAT), we could pass everything through a VPN and provide subdomains, mail relay etc. However, that needs a fair amount of infrastructure, things to develop. Overall, you need to sell a large number of device which need to be very reliable.
I see NC on your server the same way I see apps and Linux distro: the app is there, it works great, but the integration is a different job.
You donāt compile Firefox, do you?
Like you, (maybe? I know enough but not that much, so I canāt tell), I know my way around computers, Linux, etc. But I simply donāt have the time nor the will to become a full skilled full time admin just to have a family server.
So I cannot but recommend integration solutions made for enthusiastic.
Personnally, I use Yunohost, which allows a very easy and straightforward installation of NC for small servers. There are others alike, just like there are many Linux distro (well, ok, there are less options, but there are multiple ones!).
So, all the hard part of installation, configuration and tweaking is taken care of by skilled enthusiastic, and your moderate skills are sufficient to run a server.
NC devs have to make sure NC can be setup for a large choice of machines, use cases, etc.
Integrators have to tweak it for their ādistributionā.
End users like me can be very grateful to all these people to let me run my family cloud so easily.
It is intended for interested users, but may at time require expert knowledge. The latter for no good reason for the former, or consequentially to the aim of broadening that pool. So when someone like you have trouble, and manage to solve matters, updating the documentation means people of your inclination will have no such issue.
Over the process of users finding the platform unfit for use, and managing to get along anyway, contributing to help all, the curve seen as a barrier to entry is smoothed out over time.
Just a short answer following several discussions here at the conference:
In principal, we would appreciate it if there was an possibility without deeper knowledge of Linux or network. However, we are not here yet and itās currently more for Home Experts.
There are projects here like nextcloudpi trying to make the installation as easy as possible. Ideally, weād have a box which you can just plug into your router and start using Nextcloud. We had the Nextcloud box which was nice but not perfect, so we would have to go further, perhaps look for a more powerful device. It will be challenging to find someone building such a box which is not so easy to do and there are some risks.
How about a crowdfunded project? Or teaming up with one of the many projects that try to make a āhome NASā out of single board computers?
Anyway, if something breaks, there will always be some need to know how to fix things. Depending on the type/severity of the problem, it could require more or less knowledge which could become a problem for people who do not care about the ānuts and boltsā of the technology used.
