I’m setting up Nextcloud for personal use and want the simplest installation AND maintenance options. My goal is to have remote access to my data. I have no-ip.com as my ddns and I have a static IP assigned by my ISP.
This is my first post and I’m very new to linux and the ubuntu environment. Looking forward to the discussion.
If you are new to Linux learning Docker at the same time will probably be a bit too much, but otherwise I would recommend running Nextcloud using Docker and Docker Compose, and this on Debian Linux instead of whatever else you can think of.
Regardless, everyone has their own opinion and you will find that there are pros and cons to all of it. No matter how you twist and turn this, in the end it boils down to your ability to learn and research when you run into problems.
I would go with Ubuntu Server (not desktop) and probably use Nextcloud AIO. Based on what I’ve seen around the forum, I think when people run into problems with Nextcloud on TrueNAS, it seems like they have trouble getting it resolved, and there’s maybe some confusion due to lack of documentation.
There are probably more Nextcloud instances running on Ubuntu than anything, and it’ll give you some Linux experience along the way.
The benefit of Truenas is in managing multiple hard disks under ZFS, so if that is not what you are interested in it makes almost no sense. Quick note that Core is built on FreeBSD as opposed to Linux.
Also, worth running Nextcloud on a different server than Truenas. See their documentation for details.
FWIW, people have problems with every type of stack, be it NC directly on the OS, in LXC containers, in Docker containers, using the AIO, Snap, etc. You name it, people have both success and problems, and I dare say that there’s not much difference in the amount of it.
I recommend containers because it’s so much easier to manage the versioning and you don’t run into the endless PHP and other tooling issues that people so often have problems here and in other places too. It removes these issues mostly, but at the cost of managing Docker (which isn’t hard, but one more thing). So in the end all of these options are just tradeoffs, different pros and cons 
With the AIO I think that it works fine out of the box, but rather soon when people want to make adjustments to their setup/configuration they start to hit a wall of it being complicated (in fairness, the AIO itself is a rather complex piece of machinery if you dig into it). Again, pros and cons!
Any Linux distribution will give them Linux experience, not just Ubuntu.
I run my Nextcloud instances on Debian which uses ZFS as the filesystem, so one doesn’t really need TrueNAS in that regard, most or any Linux distro can have ZFS for your data
Thanks for the responses. I currently have another server that uses ZFS Pools (a good friend was teaching me) that is running Ubuntu. My goal with this post was just to determine if Truenas or Ubuntu was the better option. I have Nextcloud on Truenas right now, but I can’t seem to get the remote access working and before I change platforms wanted to better understand my options.
Sure, but what I see with TrueNAS is that Nextcloud is sort of a plugin for it that only a small subset of TrueNAS users use it or have any experience with it, and the installation differs greatly from other methods for NC. So it’s harder to find solutions or get help.
An astute observation if ever there was one.
Well “better” is a highly subjective term. I have two instances I maintain, one using AIO and one using vanilla Docker, both on Ubuntu, both running a long time and through various versions with little or no problems. So I recommend it personally.
TrueNAS does many things with a GUI that would be more complicated on Ubuntu, so it depends on what you want.
My friend who set up my plex server has been pushing me to learn CLI commands as he feels that is the best way to learn (I’ve always enjoyed Windows and the GUI), but don’t mind a challenge but hate it when the answers are elusive, as they have been on Truenas, and now I am beginning to understand why.
And just for the record, I’m not dragging TrueNAS. I think it’s a good platform and have used it myself many times over the years. I just have the above concerns about running Nextcloud on it as sort of a tacked-on secondary feature.
Understand, and I appreciate the candid feedback. I know there are people that vehemently defend or oppose every platform. I believe I took your response as intended and not as derogatory towards either option.
Rawtaz,
Thx. Your comments on various platforms is helping me realize how little I know about Linux. I knew there were several platforms, but assumed they’d all be very similar. The title to this thread was not intended to be platform restrictive, but now I am thinking to minimize my learning curve, perhaps I did mean it to be. I’m an old dog and don’t know how many new tricks I can learn anymore!!
If that is your intention you can join our NextcloudPi community, because providing sane defaults and guidance is the reason for our team existing. All you must do is install Debian and then run this curl script. The setup wizard will guide you from there; see docs.nextcloudpi.com for further info.
Our tooling will provide you assistance the whole way, including helping you manage your updates and such into the future. You can always ask for assistance here on the forum with the tag ncp or by asking on chat as detailed at Forum, Github or Chat: Which to use when?