Stable quality release expectations

🏷️ General
,
21

I also in general use document editing in the browser on mobile only in very rare conditions. Where best experience anyway (no matter which office application) is on the computer within native application, being in the browser makes it already worse and then on mobile another layer of annoyance. And further consider that the general feature set of google docs or Office 365 is already below Collabora in my opinion.

However, that said, I would never ever consider my use cases being the right way to work. I am sure there are very good reasons for such use cases. And just because of that obviously it should work in a stable manner.

But I learned, that if something does not work, it should be communicated to the right people/location/forum/… even when I think I cannot be the only one with that issue. I experienced many times, that everyone thought that and nobody communicated the problem. I am not sure if in the first place when sheets was unusable for weeks, the problem has been communicated. - I am using NextCloud only in a small environment, but cannot remember sheets being unusable for weeks. But consider doing spreadsheet on mobile is a very rare use case here.

22

Question: Have you actually tested it? Or is your ‘rant’ purely anecdotal, based on the linked bug report and forum posts?

I ask because I personally can’t reproduce this issue with the Collabora CODE Docker container and the Nextcloud app on Android. Scrolling is actually quite smooth after an initial slight hick-up. However, I guess also depends on the, specs of the server, the complexity of the spreadsheet, the client device and probably other factors.

So my suggestion would be: if you’re seriously considering switching to open source software, set up a test instance and try out the tools you plan to use yourself to get a first-hand impression.

Chances are, your experience might be significantly better than what you’d expect from reading GitHub issues or forum threads, since people usually only post when something goes wrong. And more often than not, those issues only occur under very specific conditions, which aren’t always clearly outlined, especially in forum posts, but also in many GitHub issues.

Also, things like performance or UI/UX quality are often highly subjective. :wink:

23

And furthermore: It is true even for any other proprietary software, that you would do good to have a test environment where you test everything before rolling out. Bugs - even serious ones - can be found in all types of software.

24

I did some testing before asking, and some more testing as I got more feedback. I understand your point of view.

In all the following scenarios I checked in Firefox and Chrome, mobile and desktop, in some combinations I was also able to test in the android recent mobile app.

  • AIO docker compose :latest
  • AIO docker compose :20250512_082954
  • Next Clouds own Instant Trial version
  • Collabora Online 25.04.0.3 via a friendly communty contact

In all cases I checked the simplest of all sheets: 10 x 10 cells with “test” as cell content in a shared sheet with Edit permissions.

On the selfhosted instances the whole physical dedicated server did nothing else and had plenty of ressources. One dedicated physical server, One user.

The conclusion so far is that navigation and editing in Sheets in all cases are buggy in Desktop and useless in mobile, and has been in many versions for a long time.

As said from the start of the post, many other things in the Next Cloud stack works impressively well right out of the box, and I am really really hoping NC in any kind of setup can be a serious candidate for production ready office products.

I realize I may be a minority, but Im convinced the only real way forward for any serious office platform, is among many other things, to also support mobile 100% flawlessly.

At the very least, my highly subjective UX expectations for instance include, that data is not deleted on drag and drop, and that scrolling in a mobile sheet does not warp speed jump to random places making navigation practically impossible.

I do of course understand that bugs sometimes appear in production, I do not understand if not even one of the impressive list of users would want to navigate a sheet in mobile, and that such a bug persist for so long.

Certainly this specific bug is what I focus on here. But the real intent is to understand the quality, risks and expectations associated with a shift away from current US office platforms. There are massive costs financially and mentally when shifting such a platform, and now more than ever, many European agencies and institutions want to actually change.

I really want to know the reaction to “Uhm, sorry Minister-President, you cant review this spreadsheet on your phone”

25

Then, like presidents do in such situations these days, I suppose you have to start babbling about something completely unrelated! :laughing:

Seriously. I don’t know why it doesn’t work for you. On my Pixel 7 with Android 15 connected to my NC31 server with the latest CODE Docker container, scrolling in spreadsheeds works fine. Not like consistent 90fps fine, but fine. I didn’t test it in browsers though, only in the Nextcloud app.

26

I think I could reproduce your problem on Raspberry with raspbian and Nextcloud on latest version plus Collabora online version 24.04.13.3 b7ba9a23ba accessing that with an Android phone (Android 14).

But as others already stated: Collabora has nothing to do with NextCloud. Collabora is just integrated into NextCloud but a separate product on its own. So please don’t blame Nextcloud for something that is not broken there but in another product.

27

I understand this structure.

However, Nextcloud is a huge “client of Collabora”, and the impressive list of Nexcloud clients and cases suggests that many end users will have a disappointing UX on mobile.

In addition, the communty is relying on NC releases for them to serve the office platform to their own clients.

In total millions of end users will have some sort of degraded NC experience, and this is what now consititutes the general opinion on how well a large non-MS/Google/Apple office platforms work.

Therefore, I argue, it is of utmost importance for NC and every distributed vendor, that the UX is at least reasonalble for a variety of usecases. And I do indeed claim that mobile sheet capabilities is a reasonable expectation to have for an office platform anno 2025. Im not interested in anectodal information about many end users will be on a laptop. I serously straight out claim that any serious office platform must support mobile. At least to some serious extent.

From a brand or economical point of view, the relative cost for NC for financing critical bugfixes like this is much much smaller, and the win much much larger compared to any of the smaller vendors.

Personally, since Im in the early state of researching alternative selfhosted office platforms vetting installation, updates, community, performance, etc., I feel that the task of engaging in understanding the collabora sourcecode, debugging and potentially contributing some pulll request at this early point, is way way way out of scope for our team. Had we alreafy been a vendor for years, this would be a totally other situation.

Lastly again, I have a huge respect for the platform and components overall, and the selfhosted installation worked like a charm in all other respects.

28

You linked the bug report, if there were millions stranded with this bug, there would be more than just 3 reactions to this bug report. If there were 3000 thumbs up, this would be a different story.

From Nextcloud side, I don’t know what business relation they have with collabora, if they can escalate things with collabora, use their own resources, … but if it is about prioritizing and you are motivated to get your bug fixed, I’d rather check with the Collabora community and their developers.

I don’t know of any details, which features are guaranteed and in case of problems fixed within a certain time frame. There is a bit of guesswork to figure out what feature is essential to Nextcloud and what urgency they attribute to a malfunction. Are there security-related implications for all the users, just certain configurations? Does it break the whole app, or is there a specific function not work? Are there workarounds? Does it affect user experience?

29

What do you base that claim on? A single bug report and your personal experience, while conveniently ignoring my previous post, in which I mentioned that I can’t reproduce this bug.

I’m simply going to argue the opposite and say that tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands (millions might be a stretch, but I don’t have any numbers), use Collabora productively—including on mobile.

I understand that if you’re affected by this scrolling issue, it can be frustrating. But to conclude from that that millions of users can’t use the product is—sorry—ridiculous. First, not all users are affected by this bug, probably not even a majority. And regarding performance: while it’s not quite on par with desktop LibreOffice, it’s still very usable—at least on my instance.

30

I wasn’t aware of that bug either, but I can reproduce, now that I know about it. And I voted and commented on that bug at Collabora, so hopefully this helps the OP.

31

I totally agree with you, about the requirements/expectations for an office experience in 2025. That said, in comparison to 10 years ago, workflows changed, at least in a way that the variety of ways in which software is used, is more widespread and some paths are walked less than you might expect. For example I can’t remember when I used a mail merge wizard the last time. Further, I create far more Markdown files in NextCloud than Office documents. In my normal daily work I do not create a single office document. In rare conditions a spreadsheet, but not mobile. - I had one document in google docs which was edited often simultaneously. When I moved it to NextCloud it got Markdown format so using totally different edit method now. So this is an example of how things may change.

That said - after I commented on the Collabora issue, we got a response with link with suggestions to try a newer version where similar other issues were fixed. So one could give it a try.

32

Certainly! And this points in the opposite direction from what has been the oldschool Microsoft/Ribbon way for decades. Simpler UI, fewer exotic features, super stable fast basic services that does one thing 100% right.

This is just wonderful:) I will try right away to do an upgrade.

33

I meant no disrespect, and if you cannot reproduce, then for sure not all are affected.

I tested four very different platforms/installs in four different browsers plus the nextcloud app, which was 17 out of 17 tests with severe UX problems for the most simple test sheet I could produce. Including older Collabora Online versions.

Therefore I concluded that it was a serious bug which has been in live production for a long time.

And by extension that this seriously affects the first impression of how well a candidate performs and how reliable it is.

Again, installing the AIO and testing many other things has been very impressive.

You are of course right, that I have no significant representative statistical ground across the entire userbase to claim any of this. I extrapolated the 17 cases.

34

Yes, the bug is serious, and I can’t say whether this bug still exists in the latest commercial COOL Production Server version or if it’s only fixed in the CODE (test) versions. It’s also possible that the issue is client-side and only occurs with certain Android or iOS versions or on specific devices.

For example, I’ve encountered another bug that only appears when using the AOSP keyboard, but not with the Google Keyboard (Gboard) or some other third party keyboards.

Either way, it would probably be much more helpful if you shared your findings in the relevant bug report, rather than posting dramatic speeches full of exaggerations here. That kind of approach might work elsewhere, like in politics, but even there, it usually only has a superficial effect. It certainly doesn’t help in this context. :wink:

35

@martinb14 Have you tested with Collabora 24 or 25? Collabora 25 was released at the end of April. It seems to me that Collabora 25 is a bit slower in my tests from today.

36

as much as I appreciate any discussion on our nice little forum I’d though like to point out, that we are discussing a bug/techincal problem of a 3rd-party-app.
So why not discussing the problem where it does first and foremost belong?

Or is this is too abstract to understand: where you you discuss the BOSCH-rearview-wiper not being synched with the windshield-wipers on a Mercedes-car? Would you do that on a Mercedes-forum? Or rather at the Bosch-forum?
As Mercedes is just a client (an important one, of course) of this BOSCH-system it wouldn’t make any sense to discuss it on a MB-forum. If you want to get it done, try discussing at the BOSCH-forum.

At least my final 2ct on this thread

37

Your position is the bureaucrat’s point of view: You look at the formal side of things while we normal users look at the practical side of things: Does the application work as expected? Collabora is an essential part of the Nextcloud product and is also marketed as such not just a whatever third party app like “Wordfind”, So users expect Nextcloud to fix things that are broken, in this case, in collaboration with Collabora.

In many discussions on this forum I see this conflict between “users” and “bureaucrats”

38

Yeah, well, but in this case it doesn’t matter, at least not at this point of the discussion, because in neither case the forums are the place where issues are actually getting solved, instead it’s the issue trackers of the respective projects.

Also, and I said that many times, if you’re hosting and maintaining your own server infrastructure, you’r not just a simple user anymore. :wink:

39

I don’t know what the Nextcloud forum is for if you can’t ask other Nextcloud users about their experiences with software that is bundled with Nextcloud by default (at least for AIO). To use your example: As a Mercedes driver*, I would also ask in the Mercedes forum what the experience is with the Goodyear tires that comes per default with the car.

But of course, rants against Nextcloud or unrealistic expectations towards a third party app are inappropriate here, totally agreed. But IMHO a discussion should be possible.

But that’s just my personal opinion.

*I don’t have a Mercedes

40

Of course you should be able to do that, but in a rational way. :wink:

Yes, and it’s counterproductive to the actual goal, which I assume is to fix an issue or implement a feature.

I don’t know if the idea behind such overdramatic posts is to create pressure in the hope that the developers will come up with a solution faster, or if it’s just about venting. Either way, they don’t help solve the actual issue.

A calm and rational description of the issue and what has already been tried would have been appropriate here. And if the forum then suggests posting those findings in the relevant issue tracker, it certainly doesn’t help to start a proxy discussion about bureaucracy or post a manifesto about how terrible the bug is and how millions of users supposedly can’t use the product because of it. :wink: