We hit feature freeze this week and today weâve put the first beta of Nextcloud 15 on our download servers, ready for your testing! As always, we want to make sure that upgrades are smooth as well as, of course, day to day usage. There is still a fair bit of polishing to do as well so weâre looking for all feedback we can get.
Winter is coming! In all seriousness, 'feature freeze' means that we will no longer add new features, just improve and stabilize the release further. This is the stage in our development at which we release our first beta and begin to focus on polishing and bug fixing. The perfect time to get involved and help us make this release awesome!
What's new
Too much to mention! This is a major release so it comes with loads of goodies. But it is still early beta, so let's focus first on polishing it up before we talk about what's new. We have our automated tests and it has gotten some basic smoke testing but no test scheme can replace the myriad of ways you all use Nextcloud, on NAS devices to big iron servers!
Besides testing, your help is also welcome in polishing. Small UI improvements, fixes to details - and of course bugfixes! If you are new to Nextcloud, youâre more than welcome to get involved - simply join us on github or check out this page on our website. Note that translations are very welcome too! Now is the time to translate and make sure 15 is ready for as big a number of users as possible. We have millions of users and they donât all read English!
If you are on the beta channel, we will make beta 15 available soon, stay tuned!
Things like âchanged the fontâ and ânew viewâ and ânew sharing sidebarâ are all things youâll test by any kind of basic usage, but yeah, Iâll try and make a list of things-to-test for the next beta announcement, promise.
It was mostly a matter of âtoo little time, too much to doâ
But the biggest changes are in UI refinements and sharing improvements. Much of the rest is very low level (hard to test specifically, other than just by using the app), or in apps. We talk about that later, not to give all the spoilers away
They will tell us more details later,
Nextcloud looks like underwater, they donât have time to do a changelog, to write documentation ⌠they have a lot to do, they need more help. Guys for translating, writing docs and etcâŚ
You just have to update a test server and tell if you see some bugs in :
Web UI
Regressions
Deadlocks
This version 15 wonât have a lot of great improvement like new features. But it normally be an undercover update for performances.
Your own standard use case tests can be run at any moment, to see if there are no regressions.
Stability and reliability are Nextcloud attributes many people like.
When major changes are announced we can test them as well, and maybe add them into the standard use case tests.
Installed the 15 beta on my testsite from the zip file, because web updater does still not show up with the version (beta channel is activated). No issues so far, seems to be quite fast. The file app seems to have a new default view with very large icons, but I could reset it to the old grid view.
Who thinks about updating, note that the compatible app update check does not yet work, it will tell you that all apps have updates for NC15 available: https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/12477