I really love your products and your expanding platform.
Could you please design your program in such a way that rebooting machines is no longer necessary.
Today most users have higly individual installations with many dependencies. New reboots normally restart 5-20 other interdependant applications and make problems. When a single program requires a complete reboot of the operating systems, normally something is not OK. Rebooting machines is in my eyes just a bad practice of unmature software design. I am aware of your open source nature, but this does not necessarily mean “quick and dirty”.
Uhm, not sure I understand. Why do you think there’s a need (from nextcloud) to reboot a machine?
I usually only do this on major OS upgrades, which has nothing to do with nextcloud?
It’s not fixed in the current one because I had to reboot my laptops after updating yesterday. The strange thing is it says a reboot is required, but also has a checkbox to launch Nextcloud. It seems to me that requiring a reboot and offering to launch the program should not co-exist. That’s definitely a bug whether the reboot is actually needed or not.
I don’t agree. Many programs require reboots after installation on Windows, in particular ones like Nextcloud that integrate with Explorer. I am of course making an assumption that you’re talking about Windows because you didn’t mention your OS, version, or really any detail at all.
Since you’re a software design expert, perhaps you’d consider contributing to the project, rather than just dropping insults on a forum. I’m sure many users would appreciate you fixing the reboot issue.
There are several issues and ideas mixed up in this thread, about how the client should behave regarding reboots.
in some older versions the computer was rebooted without warning after an installation / update. This was a real issue which has been fixed for quite some time now.
@mthorner wants that no reboot is necessary at all, not even a planned one, and he thinks that only “quick and dirty” programmed software does need reboots. You already commented on that, and I completely agree with your statement. So I would not count a planned reboot as a bug or a real issue.
According to your description, a new bug was introduced, where reboot is required, but it also shows a checkbox to launch Nextcloud. So maybe someone should open a new bug report on GitHub, specifically to this issue.
As already assumed, I am speaking of forced reboots of Windows clients.
Having worked for 35 years as exec in the software industry and leading many development departments, I can assure you, that rebooting clients is generally considered a last resort. Large scale rebooting generate tons of not directly related support tickets and more work.
Just remember the last time a relevant and mature software asked you to reboot your client to install the next version, Onedrive? Google Drive? Dropbox?
I am using Nextcloud on a nonprofit project paying an ISP for the server. My “users” are mostly on Windows with zero computing skills. Every rebooting generates phone calls, because people are scared of malware.
My “quick and dirty” comment refers to the fact that developers can defintely include “no client reboot” into their specs. If the Nextcloud developing team does not have enough funding - their management has to fix it.
You are still not completely clear how this behaves. Does it ask if you want to reboot now or later, or does it reboot without warning? The former is ok, although it would be better if a reboot could be avoided altogether. The latter would be a real problem. But afaik, this problem has been fixed and it doesn’t reboot your computer without warning anymore.
Well, maybe the client needs that reboot though, to avoid unwanted side effects. I’m not an expert, but you seem to be. Please participate in the development, then we can all benefit. You could open a clearly expressed feature request on GitHub, even better would be a pull request, where you suggest specific changes in the code right away.
In any case, we will not be able to solve the matter here in the forum.
Yes, and this has been the case for the last few versions I think. I install the update. On the last page, there is a checkbox that says “launch Nextcloud.” After that, it prompts for a reboot, while already starting the program in the background, which seems to run just fine. So the way I see it, if the reboot is really needed, it should not be launching the software immediately.
If rebooting your computers is causing support tickets, you have other problems that have nothing to do with Nextcloud. Both technical and personnel issues from the sound of it.
As I mentioned before, you’re making the assumption that the reboot is not actually needed, but you don’t know if this is actually the case. Fewer programs require it now than used to be needed in the past, but I reject the argument that any software that actually needs a reboot is because of messy or lackluster development.
Quite often a service is restarted in the background instead of the whole system. Some programs even try to do this with explorer.exe, but this can cause instability in Windows, so the real solution might be to have the user log out and back in. But it’s far simpler to just restart.
These same users who are scared of rebooting because of malware are probably also sitting on months of security updates.
