Is there a more stable release channel for the Windows desktop client?

📱 Desktop & mobile clients
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Hi everyone,

I’d like to ask whether there is currently a more stable release channel for the Nextcloud Windows desktop client, or whether this might be something worth considering for the future.

We are a small non-profit association in Germany. A few years ago, we moved from Dropbox to a managed Nextcloud instance (so updating server version isnt our job), and most of our team uses the Windows desktop client to sync files.

Over the years, we’ve experienced recurring issues with client updates, synchronization errors and updates that caused the client to stop working properly.

For a small team like ours, this can be quite challenging. We have 17 team members working on a voluntary basis in their spare time. I recently had to help people to reinstall the next Windows client manually (35.0.1 => 35.1.2). Today, we have another issue with updating to “.03”. I’m not looking to report a specific bug here.

Rather, I’d like to ask:

Is there a way to use a more conservative release channel for the Windows client, with less frequent updates that have had more time for testing and are considered particularly stable?

If such an option doesn’t exist, would it make sense to introduce something like this? Or perhaps make the Stable channel itself a bit more conservative?

I also found the documentation describing the four available update channels, including an Enterprise channel, which appears to offer an even more conservative and thoroughly tested release cycle. However, in our Windows clients, we can only choose between three channels: Daily, Beta and Stable. All our clients are already set to Stable.

Is the Enterprise channel only available for certain types of installations or paid services? Or is there another reason why it isn’t available as an option in the Windows desktop client?

Of course, we really appreciate all the work that goes into Nextcloud.

Thanks for your time and for considering this idea!

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In the link you posted it says: “Special enterprise version for customers for the best possible experience”

So yes, I’d say it’s only available for customers with an enterprise contract: https://nextcloud.com/pricing/

However, you can of course run your own tests and, if necessary, stay on an older version for longer. And theoretically, since it’s open source, you could even backport patches yourself to an older version. The latter is probably not really feasible in most cases, unless you have the necessary developer resources available who can maintain their own fork.

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The mindset here has been the same since day one: The product is free, and everyone is invited to submit a pull request.

It’s kind of like telling a blind person, “Open your eyes and you’ll see.”

But only one person can do that!

And now you know what “God mode” means.

As long as this mindset doesn’t change, everything will stay the same—or rather, the bugs will increase instead of decrease.

GitHub proves it to us every day.

I’m sorry!

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That isn’t really an answer to the question you quoted, nor is it what I said. It’s also not the standard response to issues on GitHub or in the forums.

In other words, it’s not as simple as you portray it, just as the raw number of open issues in a public bug tracker for a product as popular as Nextcloud — which is also used by many home users and non-IT professionals — doesn’t say all that much about the actual quality of the product.