And will the client stop working and force an update or is the client still working with restrictions in the features?
The reason why I ask is the Auto Update problem with windows desktop clients without admin rights. I know that ist will be recommended (security risks, new features, fewer bugs etc) to use the most recent client, but with the auto update problem we need to find a compromise how often we want to update the clients with admin intervention.
How did you come to this conclusion? The maintenance and release schedule you linked to is only listing the server versions, and nowhere does it even mention any client versions, let alone that certain client versions are only supposed to work with certain server versions.
The list does say though that only server versions 28 and 29 are still supported and that all versions older than these are already end of life.
It will probably still work with Nextcloud 40 or 50, and I’m pretty sure a client version from the early days of Nextcloud would still work with a current server version. I am also pretty sure that if there ever is such a breaking change, it will be prominently announced.
What can happen over time, though, is that it becomes incompatible with the operating system it is supposed to run on, i.e. a seven year old client version would probably still work with Nextcloud 29, but would most likely cause problems on current Windows, MacOS, or Linux versions, if it would run at all.
Nevertheless, I would recommend keeping the clients reasonably up-to-date, as new versions will not only include new features like support for login-flow or virtual files that have been added in the past, but also optimizations, bug fixes and security fixes.
And I found no list with a client+server version matrix. My hope was, that the older client version stop working with a certain server version to force the client user without admin rights to open a service request for updating the client. The main problem is the admin right requirement for nextcloud client updates, especially when every month a new client is published (what is really good for feature+security reasons). A solution is to deavticate the Auto Update feature and the client becomes more vulnerable to security. The user does not care, because their main thing that they can work, but for the admins it is a horror senario.
As I said, it’s very unlikely that they will suddenly stop working with a particular server version. But of course it makes sense to keep the clinets reasonably up to date for other reasons, such as bug fixes and security fixes. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to upgrade to every single minor release immediately, and you may also skip certain releases.
Well, for that we can’t offer a solution here in the forum. At the moment at least, it’s just the way it is.
The topic has also been discussed many times on GitHub, maybe you can search there for corresponding issues, or open a new issue if you have suggestions on how to improve it. But at least for now you have no choice but to manually update the clients. Or you could of course package it and distribute it via a software depolyment system such as SCCM.
Also, How do you solve this for other software? I can hardly imagine that the Nextcloud client is the only software that requires admin rights when installing/upgrading, at least in the past, when I still did Windows support, almost every software required admin rights.
i have tried it with the new 3.14.0 desktop client version.
config.php looks like:
…
‘loglevel’ => 2,
‘maintenance’ => false,
‘ldapProviderFactory’ => ‘OCA\User_LDAP\LDAPProviderFactory’,
‘minimum.supported.desktop.version’ => ‘3.14.0’,
‘twofactor_enforced’ => ‘true’,
…
With client version 3.13.x before it comes the error:
After updating the desktop client to 3.14.0 and restart the client the same error occurs. Other nextclouds without the config parameter are working fine with the old and new client version.
Bug or is it the wrong position in the config file?
as the setting affects the client it seems to work technically… please try some lower version e.g. 3.10 and test with and older client… maybe there is some edge case in version comparison like = vs < or =<
You are right, I tried client 3.13.3 with 3.13.3 → does not work, but with 3.13.2 in the config it does work. So the config works with < but have to work with =< because of the description of the parameter (minimum version that will be allowed).
