We have released the first release candidate of the desktop client v2.5 - that means, we can’t find bugs anymore and we need your help to find out if there’s still something that has to be fixed before we release it!
There is still a number of open PR’s and issues we want to fix before final, currently the devs are busy with a customer project but help is of course welcome. Some less urgent things will simply go in 2.5.1.
Yes, this release has end-to-end encryption. It has been tested extensively already and shouldn’t lose any data. Interoperability with the mobile clients should also work - please, test all of it to make sure!
Note: E2E performance isn’t great
Note that the E2E is quite slow: due to the design, which requires multiple server requests per uploaded file and can only upload sequentially, making it take easily 5-10x longer than normal syncing. Note that the difference depends more on the NUMBER of files than their size. Big files don’t go much slower, but small ones do.
This means that E2E isn’t suitable for ALL your files, but that was never the goal. If you have one or two folders with very important data you want to protect from the server, it should do great.
We do intend to change this but it requires some invasive changes to the protocol and then to server and client(s) so this will take some time and it is not high priority: E2E was designed for a limited amount of files that require more protection. If you need it to work for large number of files you can of course jump in and help, or let your Nextcloud sales contact know that it is an issue for you.
Downloads
So version 2.5.0RC1 can be downloaded now:
https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/prereleases/Windows/Nextcloud-2.5.0.61474-rc1-20181026.exe
https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/prereleases/Mac/Nextcloud-qt5.9.2-2.5.0.20181026rc1.pkg
https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/prereleases/Linux/Nextcloud-2.5.0.20181026-rc1-x86_64.AppImage
Look in the https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/prereleases/ folder for other options.