First of all I appreciate your motivation and would support a good comprehensive guide discussing specific use cases and applications with focus on daily usage and integration with Nextcloud. But I really fear this will stop at some point before reaching a good state just because there are soo many different requirements and it’s hard to cover all of them.
We have few discussions here with a similar goal
- What other open source software do you use besides Nextcloud? Recommend something!
- Mobile note taking with your private cloud: announcing Joplin/Nextcloud integration
I don’t think “average Joe and Jane” are going to read ratings and reviews as you already stated they “do not want to leave trodden paths” but this will help the community and engaged users to make the jorney easier following some “crowd wisdom” and knowing how others address daily requirements. Feel free to start writing articles covering your experience - I would recommend to split different topics like contacts management, calendar, note taking into different topics.
For Windows I’m not aware of any deep integration of calendar and contacts and IMHO Thunderbird UI very good and I’m using TB with contacts and calendar integration into NC - but I know for some reason many people don’t like good old UIs anymore and prefer “modern” look with almost no controls and many useless whitespace… the only critics from me in terms on TB integration is the complex multi-stage setup process creating application pwd, setting up up each calendar and contact account individually - more straightforward “integrate all Nextcloud functions” assistant would be really cool.
I’m using Joplin with Joplin-server as backend for note-taking. Unfortunately back in time when I was looking for OneNote replacement NC Notes app was really basic and didn’t cover my needs. I used NC as sync target for some time Joplin made the NC activity history almost unuseable so I switched to Joplin-server as backend.
I think you have to ask Google… from my experience I often find this forum at the top of the search results… but this might be some bias or filter bubble because Google knows I’m visiting this site frequently. or maybe I use “non Reddit” search terms 