Serious question: Is there even a real community here? I feel like 95% of all topics on the forum only resolve around installation and configuration issues (sometimes really easy to fix issues with some googling). If I compare this forum to something like Homeassistant then I don’t see much contributions and projects on this forum here. The “real” community resides on Github (and Gitlab, being selfhosted or not) where development of Nextcloud and everything surrounding it happens.
E2EE is another still unfinished project.
Sadly development of the desktop client didn’t exist for a long time, it was only theming at the beginning, but especially @misch does a great job now fixing it up.
If only file sync would be supported then there are already a dozen or so competitors out there so Nextcloud would go under with all those other tools out there. The app ecosystem is what makes Nextcloud great and if Owncloud moves away to Go there will be no project out there anymore that has as many apps (that provide some awesome features) as Nextcloud. App development is also a place where the community (on Github mostly, not on this forum) can make an impact by adding awesome features that couldn’t and shouldn’t be in the core itself.
Other “end users in business” want an integrated solution that can handle most of the tasks well without relying on and putting everything on US clouds and not having ten different stacks to maintain that drive up maintenance and costs. Nextcloud would be a nice choice, but small and medium businesses are left out sadly from this.
As @jospoortvliet said, Jitsi integration should be in a sperate app unrelated to talk, which is pretty much like everything (external) is done in Nextcloud to keep it outside of the core. Talk would need a different backend as posted here:
I know it was in the wrong section nextcloud/spreed and obviously they can’t interface it.
It still want think this topic has to be on Github.
I can’t do pull request, i’m not a coder and i don’t have the work already done.
And as @JimmyKater BountySource can give a bad coded solution
Edit : i understand the external term, in fact it will be on the github account of the dev mydev/jitsiappfornextcloud
But how to find this if not speaking about that on a thread on the nextcloud github ?
No it’s not
You could contribute to github without doing pull request.
I made pull request for inflex/flexbv because it’s adding data in text files
For Nextcloud it’s modifications on php files that i know how to read but don’t know how to code.
On the NC github i test fixes, and modifications on my test server and then validate it on the issue.
You can contribute by helping on the issues and posting logs of errors for helping dev.
I think this is a really bad idea… But that’s OK since it’s never going to happen…
The way I see it, Frank abandoned its own firstborn (ownCloud) to get implemented the exact business model he wanted and what jos likes to reiterate using every chance he gets.
And one of the cornerstones of this model is no outside influences!
It has been repeated more than once: developing a feature the “community” insists on and selling it (let’s say $99) will
a) distract from the primary objectives (that the “community” doesn’t and won’t know)
b) will most likely not pay for its development
The moment you introduce this “kickstarter” philosophy, people that mostly b!tch now about NC’s business model impurity (and are subsequently ignored by the majority) will feel entitled to be heard and answered by management… What a nightmare!
I see here a description of Nextcloud community that I find misleading for the casual reader. We know what it means but a potential user coming here would wonder what kind of place he’s in…
The Nextcloud community in my humble opinion is well alive!
Allow me to provide some examples.
Developers, Developers, Developers
The android apps are developed mainly by the community. Even the main Nextcloud app has a major involvement of developer which are not from Nextcloud GmbH. This is also true for the bookmark app, the deck app, the password app, …
Also the developer of DAVx ⁵ (the tool to synchronize your calendars and contacts) are part of the community.
Several interesting / useful Nextcloud apps have a strong involvement of external developer. The first ones that I remember are the Bookmarks app, the Map app, the polls app, the Data Analytics app. these apps are more and more interacting with other parts of Nextcloud, like for example the integration of Data Analytics with Flow.
And I voluntarily skipped apps like the Cookbook one, which are nice and interesting but less near the “core” of Nextcloud functionality.
Even in the main parts of Nextcloud if you follow github activity you find a lot of external contributors.
Clients
They are part o the community too…!!!
Us
We are part of the community.
Several times here a lot of us (people like @tflidd, @rakekniven, @Nemskiller, … ) provide technical help to some user.
There are some discussions, there is the occasional disagreement between us or with @jospoortvliet… As far as I can tell, this is part of the usual community dynamics!
Yeah, but…!
Someone of us would love to be heard more! I shared the desire sometimes, yet I noticed that there are some factors that are an intrinsic difficulty and a lot of people does not notice them
The users are not developer, nor experts
In a lot of communities the users are developers (the users of a language library, for example) or are by definition experts (like for example the 3D modelling program Blender). They use that tool for hours, trying to improve its use with a lot of training. If they have a problem, for them it is something that they considered for tens of hours.
If the typical user of Nextcloud has a problem with the repeated calendar appointments, he has considered the problem maximum for tens of minutes…
I did notice that me and other people give feedback with a level of detail or reflection that cannot be compared to what happens with other software. This depends from the characteristics of Nextcloud: it is one of the tools that are better when they disappear (you use them with a minimum mental effort.)
Design is important
One thing is necessary to create a tool that disappears: extreme attention to design and usability.
Usability seems simple yet it isn’t.
Several times I vehemently disagreed with @jan opinions and asked for something, yet we cannot avoid to recognize that Nextcloud overall usability is good… and that is really difficult to provide good suggestions!
It IS complicated
In spite of the lot of contributors, entering in the list is not easy at all.
This is because:
a new feature that is not well integrated and will be unmaintained is worthless, as several developers explained us
Nextcloud is a big system, you have to study a lot to understand e.g. the comment mechanism. They are working on lowering the barrier to the entrance, yet at the same time it is a big piece of software
a lot of people which is good at coding struggles with the requirements imposed by the design guidelines
In addition the apparently easy features are really difficult. Take for example the possibility of sharing bookmarks:
Marcel Klehr is finishing it, and I remember I read a request for it a few years ago…
In the meantime he had to become the developer of the app, to make a complete refactoring of the backend and frontend… The sharing UI will be perhaps integrated in the standardized UI elements provided by the vue components (it means that other apps could reuse it…).
The same is true for this request of API for the polls app:
“this will be not a big thing, since back- and frontend are now separated”. Now means after years of work; it means also that we will have the possibility of an android app…
So a lot of times I understand that we as users make requests that seem to us obvious and easy, yet they need an huge amount of work.
I am seeing now realized a lot of requests made years ago and, even if I am not a programmer, I seem to notice a lot of technical work (like improving the database structure…) that will allow the rapid developement of several requests made by us
All this to say that I do agree with what @JimmyKater said with much less words:
Yep, maybe the developers could comment more… yet that would mean that they would develop less !
We walked away from using it last year, having finally given up on them ever bothering to fix SMB access, which was broken in version 11 or 12 several years ago. Lots of garbage superfluous features added when a basic, core bit of functionality was left entirely broken for years.
as this thread seems to become a general “they did this and that wrong and now i dont like them anymore” - maybe caused by by a misleading thread-title - i just allowed myself to change it… following the subtle aim of @Nemskiller who said that he wanted to “praise” NC…
I get really mad at Nextcloud when they post the Too soon Nc v14 that break a lot servers…
i also get mad when the gouv. ask me to pay my taxes last year because i earned money…
I also very upset because the trees aren’t as green as in 1995 ! Do you remember when…
I posted a topic for gathering nice ideas (or not but we can talk about that) and now it’s becoming the Angry Video Games Nerd toilet topic.
I believe NC spread themselves too thin too fast.
And the latest snafu with OnlyOffice will make them re-think this approach.
As long as jos does not overdo with his shock-marketing articles, they will be OK.
About 2 out of 3 advertised features of NC are solid and usable even in business environments.
Stick to those and leave out (for now) the rest…
Nextcloud 14 broke a lot of things because a lot of deprecated stuff was finally removed and this broke a lot of apps. But @MorrisJobke (hope he comes back one day) and the others did an awesome job helping the app developers out where they could to fix up their stuff.
Exactly like you should do it. If people don’t fall for the hyperbole it saves them and the project a lot of frustration.
IMHO, just look at the issue tracker at Github… Nextcloud is unstable and full of bugs. In my opinion, it will be better to focus on fixing all those thousands of bugs rather than introducing a lot of new futures which will by built upon on dangerous for a user’s files Nextcloud server.
I am new to and really like Nextcloud. I am an MSP for small businesses some of which could who could, with effort, be switched to Nextcloud. Any features that remain open source and transparent but help us make this switch will be great, but for us time is running out. We have a number of clients with some ageing versions of MS Office e.g. 2013 to 2019 and we really want Nextcloud to be part of our offer before we have to switch them to O365. I do not feel we are there yet, but we’ll take stock in January 2021 and see where we are. The biggest issue so far is lack of a GUI based backup and the unreliability of the GUI based upgrades. Customers demand these things and so far I’ve not seen them.
The problem is that these heavy task take a lot of resources and easily trigger timeouts when run via GUI. Backups ideally run automatically on a regular basis and don’t need to be started manually. Problem is with restore that if you wanted a full solution for that, it’s more complicated.
The upgrades over CLI are more reliable. In a business environment, I’d take the time to do this manually, so you decided when, do some tests etc. Especially if you have larger setups with a lot of data and users, you have to be careful.
I think NC does not need backup tools at all.
For anything but extreme cases NC is run as a VM.
And for those there are enterprise backup tools like Veeam…
And Veeam 10 community edition - backup of up to 10VMs - is free…
topic.
