Is Nextcloud for Home Enthusiasts or Home Experts?

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.

I agree with that opinion!

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/

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… :smiley:

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 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 :see_no_evil:

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

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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:

nice pun! :rofl:

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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.

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.

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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 - it’s a pretty big task to do pro-bono.

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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 it´s now, NC is a far cry from being able to drop Dropbox, though i´d love to.

If it wasn´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 it´s similar to Tom_Forge´s experience: my basic go to place is here, but sometimes I can´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 you’ll 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 €/$ per year (rough estimate). That the device is not getting too expensive, we charge perhaps 10€/$ 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, … 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.

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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 don’t compile Firefox, do you?

Like you, (maybe? I know enough but not that much, so I can’t tell), I know my way around computers, Linux, etc. But I simply don’t 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 “distribution”.

End users like me can be very grateful to all these people to let me run my family cloud so easily.

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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.

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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 it’s currently more for Home Experts.

There are projects here like nextcloudpi trying to make the installation as easy as possible. Ideally, we’d 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.

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How about a crowdfunded project? Or teaming up with one of the many projects that try to make a “home NAS” 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 “nuts and bolts” of the technology used.

Yes, croudfunding could be an option. We first need to figure out which device suits best our purposes.

In my opinion:

That’s a forthright and fair answer. Thank you!

I would encourage that forthrightness to be at the very top of both the Download page and the Nextcloud 12 Server Administration Manual. Maybe saying that help is available through the forums if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and build up your LAMP skills.

When I first got into Linux I signed up with Treehouse and picked up a lot (and forgot a lot by now) but if there was something like that people could do over and over again at no charge, well that could really help bridge the gap for the enthusiast. And there’s probably free of charge courses and-or material out there so it would not have to be necessarily Nextcloud created content. But if Nextcloud could mini-review and point the enthusiast to helpful content not only would Nextcloud help move the freedom march forward in terms of data, it would also be supporting the expanding skills and knowledge of the people. A win-win for us and a lose-lose for privacy invaders and techonology horders.

On an upbeat and personal note, I can report that I needed help with 3 or 4 items to get it up and self-signed secure. It just took way too long to get a response the first time I asked for help. But since then I have been able to get help when I don’t understand something in quick order. Thank you community because I do love that you are all helping people get their computing freedom and privacy back!

Definitely not unique to NC naturally, so we can look to other projects/products/solutions for how they handle these situations and perhaps work towards a solution

It´s also quite frustrating for those of us, who jumped on the Nextcloud train, spread the news enthusiastically and are stuck since the evolution from Nextcloud 9, 10, 11 to even 12 with the same basic error messages and small problems…