I've been running Nextcloud for family collaboration purposes since before the fork from Owncloud. I've been pretty happy with it overall.
My biggest gripe with it is the increasing schizophrenia of the UX devs. One thing I _loved_ about Nextcloud was that they paid a lot of attention to making it easy to navigate and use. The newer UX "enhancements" seem to be all about maximizing (useless) whitespace and making every widget as spherical as possible. The calendar UI used to be a joy to use, now it's the most frustrating calendar I have ever seen.
On the plus side, if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze. Just bump the tag on the image, redeploy, and you're done. (It did take a _lot_ of effort to migrating my existing data to the docker container, though.)
I also use Roundcube as my main email client. I've looked at bunches of them, but Roundcube is the closest thing to a web-based Thunderbird that I have seen. Unfortunately, this had a UI "update" too and now practically nothing can be customized the way I prefer. If someone forks Roundcube and brings back the old theme, I will switch to it tomorrow.
I run around 15 Nextcloud instances. One is for 1500 odd people for whom safety is quite important - it delivers lots of docs to a lot of devices. Those users are moving pretty fast and rove in and out of some form of ethernet service with a lot of irregularity.
My home service has to deal with some huge users (wife, phone, camera) (dad, constant saving, vast numbers of docs).
Work instance - all of the above!
I very rarely deal with the web UI but when I do it simply works or when I look into /pictures etc: locks up but that is generally the browser giving up and not the app.
I migrated a post office with several domains from RC to Snappy Mail. RC seemed to have stalled a few years back. SM is rather nifty so I'll stick.
Roundcube has been languishing a bit since the failed Roundcube-next fiasco. You can criticize the Nextcloud group for many things but at least they have proven to be consistent with pushing forward their open source projects.
> tangled and ugly mess of a UI
Maybe I'm an odd one but I have no issues with the UI. It's clean yet more info dense than many other commercial offerings.
> It is slow
I have mine working better than any google property. Nextcloud relies heavily on a performant database setup, so moving that to a separate NVME drive was one of the greatest improvements I ever made. That and properly handling image preview generation.
> Problem with free and open source software is that you have to follow the passion of the devs
Nextcloud is produced by a commercial entity, they are not a passion project. They target large installations and so tend to focus on that use-case. This makes tuning the stack to a small deployment a little bit of work.
Maybe this has been improved, but I remember thinking that and then it biting me because updating to the latest image (linuxserver/nextcloud) wasn't actually updating nextcloud itself, just the environment (php, etc.)
When I realized this, I had to go through several major nextcloud upgrades, incrementally going from one major version to the next.
Then it bit me again a few months later where nextcloud updated their maximum supported php version, and the docker image I was on quickly bumped the bundled php version to the new maximum, so the older version of nextcloud suddenly refused to start - even to run the updater. I ended up finding the max version check in nextcloud's php code and commenting it out, after that I was able to run the nextcloud update manually.
After being bit twice, I finally automated the full process so that the nextcloud software is updated in addition to the environment.
Don't use linuxserver images. My feeling is they were done by someone who doesn't understand docker very well. Frequent use of supervisor, lack of logs on stdout, weird automagic config approach.
It may feel convenient if someone did homelab without docker, but will bite you in the long run.
I just use the regular "official" docker hub image, not the linuxserver one. Not sure what the differences may be.
The "major versions incremental upgrades" is a fundamental nextcloud thing, to do with their database migrations I expect. I was way behind and had to do three of them in a row when I containerized my Nextcloud instance, but they all worked fine, thankfully.
It's even easier with the all-in-one (aio) solution. Upgrades via a simple UI, automatic Borg Backups, etc.
I run this on hetzner cloud with one storagebox for the files and one storagebox for the backups. Runs nicely, gets updates, and as the storageboxes do automatic snapshots, I have double backups.
Can you use a UI to upgrade the underlying container? It's not with docker-compose?
If so that feels a bit like an anti-pattern, just like the WordPress container which updates the WP files inside the container itself, the container just contains the webserver, php and database.
> Unfortunately, this had a UI "update" too and now practically nothing can be customized the way I prefer. If someone forks Roundcube and brings back the old theme, I will switch to it tomorrow.
?? The old skins (Classic and Larry) are still available as plugins via PHP composer, aren't they?
I'm running on "bare metal" Digital Ocean VPS (like god intended), and I just use the web-based updater and it works well. APT on Debian handles everything else.
>self updating function of nextcloud works very well
Then that's a new development. I've been using it since about v9 and it was a complete trainwreck that might have had a 25% success rate until I gave it up and moved to the docker around v17.
> The newer UX "enhancements" seem to be all about maximizing (useless) whitespace and making every widget as spherical as possible.
I have used Firefox my entire life and sometime back they added really stupid whitespace between the address bar on both ends. Every single time I reinstall the browser on a new OS I see it and remove the whitespace. It drives me up a wall. It looks so gimmicky and like a complete waste of a UI that didnt need to be changed.
Sometimes the best UI decision is to leave things as-is, especially if your UI has been plenty standard.
I also have Nextcloud running on docker using linuxserver.io image and the upgrade process is a breeze. I usually upgrade by running watchtower once a month to update my docker images.
Why do you have to wait for someone to fork it? Can’t you just not update to the bad version? I thought that was a major appeal of hosting your own email client like this.
And given the email protocols won’t ever change, I would assume it’ll continue working the same for a decade or more.
(My only guess is a security worry, but this seems like a rather niche thing that something this niche would be unlikely to be attacked unless I were targeted by some state-level actor)
A self-hosted personal server very much needs to be kept up to date. This isn't a "state-level actor" issue; any vulnerabilities in software like this, especially in software that someone might not update in a timely fashion, will get scanned for automatically and exploited when found.
In theory, the portions that are only accessible with authentication are less security sensitive if you have only a small set of trusted users, but that's still reducing the security of your server to the security of your least security-aware user.
>On the plus side, if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze. Just bump the tag on the image, redeploy, and you're done. (It did take a _lot_ of effort to migrating my existing data to the docker container, though.)
As much as people rag on Snap, Nextcloud being available on it is also super convenient if one doesn't feel like using Docker.
I really wish someone would make an alternate frontend for nextcloud. The backend is pretty solid from what I can tell, but the web UI is basically unusable.
I kept upgrading the server because I thought the abysmal performance was a backend bottleneck. But no, if I turn on profiling in my browser, I can see it taking geologic ages to do... Whatever it's doing. The server is mostly idle just waiting for the browser to respond.
> if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze. Just bump the tag on the image, redeploy, and you're done.
Or you could just run Watchtower beside it and it will automatically update your docker containers. https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower If you are OK with automated updates.
This is software that I rely on for my day-to-day tasks. I've had upgrades break things SO MANY times, that I never do an upgrade of "production" without specifically setting aside at least 30 to 60 minutes of time to deal with any potential fallout.
If we were talking about a video game, or some kind of testing/QA environment, then sure, automatic unattended upgrades would be fine.
What happened to modern UX design? In the 90s it was driven by hard science and serving users. Now it feels like a competition to prevent anyone from accomplishing even the simplest task. Why do modern UX designers have such contempt for their users?
>On the plus side, if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze.
I've had problems that required fiddly manual interventions twice after updating to a new major version.
And what keeps me from using it for anything other than File synching is the lack of a functioning integrated backup mechanism. There is a plugin, but it's unusable shite (tries to keep the entire data in memory, big has been open for years), and I really don't want to depend on a self-made combination of Filesystem and DB backup.
One of the things I like about the docker image is just that it absolutely rigidly guarantees that all the state is located only in exactly the directories I specify, and I can be sure of that by construction.
So my Nextcloud backup solution is a cron job that shuts the entire container down and runs a restic job on it, then brings it back up when the backup is complete.
I'm not completely sure that's quite "self-made"; restic is standard enough. The only special sauce is just that I don't even bother with how to handle files that are open, especially with the database. I just shut it all down.
The nice thing is this works with all my docker stuff; the cron job just iterates them one at a time, shutting them down and doing the same standard backup on them all, then bringing them up. I don't need or want a Nextcloud-specific backup mechanism.
> It did take a _lot_ of effort to migrating my existing data to the docker container
Or you could just use some external storage. Like SMB or something. And then you would learn what updates aren't 'a breeze'. And there is no built-in SMB support in the default container.
Since I'm running it since OwnCloud days too, I have an opinion on it and it's Not. Good.
Desktop client for Windows is miserable and sucks:
a) you have something with a name longer than 30 symbols? You know need to guess what the full path of that file in the error log
b) this is like 4th year when you have an option to see the errors in a separate window, except it's... empty. Not an empty error log, it' empty window
c) Oh, best part: if the client decided to update it would kill your Explorer first (like -9), install the it's shit and then... force reboot your machine without any questions
d) when you click on the client icon in the notification area it shows multiple icons what you would thing would do something. Except it's just opens the web-interface of the instance
For years mobile client couldn't work properly with a self-signed certs, which is quite ludicrous for a solution boasted as the pinnacle of self-hosting.
UI overall is shit, it's a legacy of early 2010 concepts with Googlisation on every not needed aspect. And just outright stupid ideas, which 2.5 developers at NextCloud couldn't test, like littering EVERY (sorry for caps) folder you navigate through the web interface with README.md. And shitting bricks on non case sensitive mounts, because yes, it's hard.
Server side is always running to pump out new versions, while abandoning and deprecating addons. Oh, addon you are using is now deprecated, besides being made a mere year ago? Tough luck. Stay on the supported NC version. Except it's not supported anymore because it's a year old now version.
Oh, since 2016 it's no longer a file syncing solution, it's collaboration software or even groupware. That means there are now office suite, chat, contact lists and whatever else, including an email client. This also explains why did NC 'bought' RC. Except all those parts are not integrated good.
And finally it's a PHP app with a tons of legacy code. As soon as something breaks you are drowning in multiple screen heights of errors of PHP code. And consequently all performance troubles are solved by throwing RAM and CPU at the instance.
no company in the world is going to maintain 2 separate software products that compete with each other. They will be merged, my prediction is 12 to 18 mos
"Neither will Roundcube replace Nextcloud Mail or the other way around. ... Nextcloud Mail will evolve as it is, focused on being used naturally within Nextcloud."
We just swapped out our old webmail system (made from twigs, mud and spit) for a nice and elegant Roundcube install with custom plugins and I was already dreading having to change it.
I really tried to make Nextcloud work for me but it was too much. I‘ll pay the enshittified Dropbox premium soon.
Some bugs I encountered in a few hours of testing and trying to make it work.
The Mac auto-update installs an incompatible version to my OS; the website offers only the new incompatible and an old version that also doesn’t work (OS can not scan the app). The solution is to find a suitable version from a hidden FTP, user-unfriendly.
Some files had modification timestamps on 1.1.1970 that causes obscure sync issues on Mac. Either run some arbitrary database scripts to fix this or a simpler solution is to ‘touch’ all affected files.
The Windows Client consistently shows random minus bytes, hangs, and freezes.
The Windows Client is stuck in a loop of calculations and transmissions. Also a reinstallation is impossible as AppData folder isn’t deleted during uninstallation.
A successful complete reinstall downloads all the existing files individually, creating conflicts with identical(!?) local and server files. Why is the file hash not checked before the download? It’s frustrating and seems poorly designed.
All bugs have open GitHub issues I didn’t bother to include. Some have open PRs for years. The last bug is open for 5 years now.
If Dropbox is all you need you might be satisfied with Syncthing. I have used it for a week now, it works well and I have the warm fuzzy feeling that nobody is using my data to make a few bucks (I'm self hosting it on a home server).
I run it on TrueNAS Scale. Yes it is all quite fragile, but I managed to get it in a state where it works if I don't touch it. It's all backed on a ZFS volume. Barring significant hardware failures I will be able to access my data locally. I use Storj for mirror remote. Rebuilding would be a bit of a pain, but I have reached the E2EE personal cloud ideal. If [better than storj] cloud storage services offered BYOPK E2EE then I wouldn't need to jump through such hurdles.
I have been using Maestral for Dropbox sync on Mac for years now and it works great. The primary downside is that it doesn't have block-level sync because it's not supported by the API. The flip side is that you don't get the memory-hungry Dropbox app that embeds a web engine for some unfathomable reason.
I wish that Dropbox would bring back their old client that just did sync and not all the crap that I don't need.
By this logic, you should recommend that people don't use computers.
All software has vulnerabilities. The trick is to install it in a way which mitigates most of the typical ones: use VMs, SELINUX/APPARMOR, containers, chroots, user separations, etc.
I thought the problem with Roundcube-next was it wasn't run by the roundcube org but separate devs from Kolab? They just made the mistake of endorsing the project
I hate nextcloud with a passion and I just hope they can govern a project like roundcube... used it for 20 years even through the whole roundcube next debacle. That said roundcube itself is not an oss project with a clean track record.
Nextcloud is the OSS equivalent of IBM and ticking boxes so it's easy for management to pull the trigger but every feature is just a half-assed buggy implementation. Gobbling up OSS funds and fucking up government projects that try to rely on it. It's a disgrace.
Hmm, I am using it for years and can’t quite relate to your passionate hate.
With regards to box ticking, that is probably something you need to do if you want to compete with Gsuite and O365. Both have sales teams which are influencing some decision makers in organisations wherever they can.
If you give these people the opportunity to say ‘Ha, we can’t use Nextcloud because it does not support XYZ’ then they will. You never get fired because you bought IBM.
It is very difficult to get through this barrier. Sometimes you need to put a bit of lipstick on your pig, because others did it as well.
Plus, XYZ might be implemented half-aresed in Gsuite or O365 as well.
You wrote it yourself "might be implemented half-arsed in Gsuite or O365". You can be sure it's half-arsed with nextcloud. For smaller deployments it might be fine but it starts to get bogged down with more than 1000 users.
True but it does have the features that look attractive.
Too bad "beta quality everywhere" attitude never gets fixed. Basic stuff like weird upload indicator on the web, desktop app freezing when synching some 10GB or so and I don't even want to touch most of the third party plugins which are at alpha quality.
It's like a selfish girl that you need to treat carefully or it starts crying real fast.
I've been a very happy Roundcube user for a decade without a single problem. Also worth mentioning, their CLI update script just works without a hitch.
I'd like to see Nextcloud adopt Roundcube's commitment to reliable software. I've tried migrating my calendars, reminders and contacts several times, but it's never worked reliably. There were often subtle problems such as missing calendar entries that simply disappeared without a trace.
The GitHub issue talking about this [1] is such a mess too. Maintainers closing the question with a vague non-answer, deleting comments left and right, etc. Sounds like someone stole the money and everyone is either complicit or too embarrassed to admit that it happened.
This is wonderful news! Nextcloud gets an additional product offering for an important aspect (email!), and RoundCube gets resources in the way of dev. staff (and possibly other benefits from NextCloud funding)...and ALL of it is open source, self-hostable, and good tech.! Kudos to RoundCube and NextCloud folks!
Speaking of Roundcube: If you're hosting it without apache (as in: without htaccess support), make sure the logs directory and files aren't exposed publicly. They can contain access tokens and even encrypted passwords (encrypted with a default password unless manually changed during installation), and follow a known file structure, so it's quite common for people to get owned this way.
Sure, that’s always sound advice. However, most projects are usually designed in a way that their logs are either not exposed at all (due to not being in the webroot for example), or have measurements in place to avoid exposing them (like WordPress for example). Roundcube just puts them there and you have to actively think about excluding them from your webserver configuration. Plus, they dump really sensitive information in there by default. That’s why I wanted to explicitly point it out in this case.
Given Nextcloud's track record that doesn't bode well for Roundcube's future. We tried to make Nextcloud work for us for years, but it's just too terribly clunky, unstable, bug-ridden, and customer hostile. I hope none of that rubs off on roundcube.
Do you have recommendations for a self hosted webDAV server that could act as a Dropbox / GDrive replacement? I‘m using Nextcloud only for that use case because I haven’t found anything that seemed as stable.
I am not much into self hosting other than a barebone setup that takes care of my linux ISOs on a VPS, but you might want to check Syncthing. Put it on a server and then connect it from other places. This software is a marvel at simplicity (except a bit of settings/config - I mean for heaven's sake that can definitely be improved :P; but once done it's rock solid - it just works and not like Apple where we pretend it just works, it really just works) and robustness. Also I never face speed problem or any hiccups pretty much. It puts Dropbox and GDrive etc to shame combined.
If I could find time to be better at self hosting and will be able to take care of a server's upkeep, security/OS/package patches/updates et cetera then if I have to setup two first tools on this it would be Syncthing and RClone.
On the other hand for my current needs I use filen.io (it's on BF sale right now). It's not the best but works fine for my use - like a remote hard disk acting like backup (its "local backup" sync mode).
There's solid SFTP clients for every OS (even Android!) and all it requires on the server is the already installed OpenSSH, so I never really saw the need to look into webDAV.
We used Seafile in $old_job a couple of years back. Still had some rough edges back then (mostly with user management) but the rest was rock solid. Loved working with it, managing and sharing files was pretty easy.
I echo GPs thoughts. I use a VPS with syncthing. While that is also clunky, it works for my usecase while keeping multiple redundant copies across devices.
Readit News
My biggest gripe with it is the increasing schizophrenia of the UX devs. One thing I _loved_ about Nextcloud was that they paid a lot of attention to making it easy to navigate and use. The newer UX "enhancements" seem to be all about maximizing (useless) whitespace and making every widget as spherical as possible. The calendar UI used to be a joy to use, now it's the most frustrating calendar I have ever seen.
On the plus side, if you're using the docker image, upgrades are a breeze. Just bump the tag on the image, redeploy, and you're done. (It did take a _lot_ of effort to migrating my existing data to the docker container, though.)
I also use Roundcube as my main email client. I've looked at bunches of them, but Roundcube is the closest thing to a web-based Thunderbird that I have seen. Unfortunately, this had a UI "update" too and now practically nothing can be customized the way I prefer. If someone forks Roundcube and brings back the old theme, I will switch to it tomorrow.
Problem with free and open source software is that you have to follow the passion of the devs, which can sometimes optimize out of usefulness.
Because of this, I think this is very bad news for roundcube.
My home service has to deal with some huge users (wife, phone, camera) (dad, constant saving, vast numbers of docs).
Work instance - all of the above!
I very rarely deal with the web UI but when I do it simply works or when I look into /pictures etc: locks up but that is generally the browser giving up and not the app.
I migrated a post office with several domains from RC to Snappy Mail. RC seemed to have stalled a few years back. SM is rather nifty so I'll stick.
Roundcube has been languishing a bit since the failed Roundcube-next fiasco. You can criticize the Nextcloud group for many things but at least they have proven to be consistent with pushing forward their open source projects.
> tangled and ugly mess of a UI
Maybe I'm an odd one but I have no issues with the UI. It's clean yet more info dense than many other commercial offerings.
> It is slow
I have mine working better than any google property. Nextcloud relies heavily on a performant database setup, so moving that to a separate NVME drive was one of the greatest improvements I ever made. That and properly handling image preview generation.
> Problem with free and open source software is that you have to follow the passion of the devs
Nextcloud is produced by a commercial entity, they are not a passion project. They target large installations and so tend to focus on that use-case. This makes tuning the stack to a small deployment a little bit of work.
Maybe this has been improved, but I remember thinking that and then it biting me because updating to the latest image (linuxserver/nextcloud) wasn't actually updating nextcloud itself, just the environment (php, etc.)
When I realized this, I had to go through several major nextcloud upgrades, incrementally going from one major version to the next.
Then it bit me again a few months later where nextcloud updated their maximum supported php version, and the docker image I was on quickly bumped the bundled php version to the new maximum, so the older version of nextcloud suddenly refused to start - even to run the updater. I ended up finding the max version check in nextcloud's php code and commenting it out, after that I was able to run the nextcloud update manually.
After being bit twice, I finally automated the full process so that the nextcloud software is updated in addition to the environment.
It may feel convenient if someone did homelab without docker, but will bite you in the long run.
The "major versions incremental upgrades" is a fundamental nextcloud thing, to do with their database migrations I expect. I was way behind and had to do three of them in a row when I containerized my Nextcloud instance, but they all worked fine, thankfully.
If so that feels a bit like an anti-pattern, just like the WordPress container which updates the WP files inside the container itself, the container just contains the webserver, php and database.
?? The old skins (Classic and Larry) are still available as plugins via PHP composer, aren't they?
Edit: nope, fork of Rainloop
I'm running on "bare metal" Digital Ocean VPS (like god intended), and I just use the web-based updater and it works well. APT on Debian handles everything else.
upgrades are a breeze even without docker... the self updating function of nextcloud works very well.
Then that's a new development. I've been using it since about v9 and it was a complete trainwreck that might have had a 25% success rate until I gave it up and moved to the docker around v17.
I have used Firefox my entire life and sometime back they added really stupid whitespace between the address bar on both ends. Every single time I reinstall the browser on a new OS I see it and remove the whitespace. It drives me up a wall. It looks so gimmicky and like a complete waste of a UI that didnt need to be changed.
Sometimes the best UI decision is to leave things as-is, especially if your UI has been plenty standard.
> [ their useless UX designers ruined it ]
Why do you have to wait for someone to fork it? Can’t you just not update to the bad version? I thought that was a major appeal of hosting your own email client like this.
And given the email protocols won’t ever change, I would assume it’ll continue working the same for a decade or more.
(My only guess is a security worry, but this seems like a rather niche thing that something this niche would be unlikely to be attacked unless I were targeted by some state-level actor)
In theory, the portions that are only accessible with authentication are less security sensitive if you have only a small set of trusted users, but that's still reducing the security of your server to the security of your least security-aware user.
As much as people rag on Snap, Nextcloud being available on it is also super convenient if one doesn't feel like using Docker.
I kept upgrading the server because I thought the abysmal performance was a backend bottleneck. But no, if I turn on profiling in my browser, I can see it taking geologic ages to do... Whatever it's doing. The server is mostly idle just waiting for the browser to respond.
It's almost impressive how bad it is.
Or you could just run Watchtower beside it and it will automatically update your docker containers. https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower If you are OK with automated updates.
If we were talking about a video game, or some kind of testing/QA environment, then sure, automatic unattended upgrades would be fine.
I've had problems that required fiddly manual interventions twice after updating to a new major version.
And what keeps me from using it for anything other than File synching is the lack of a functioning integrated backup mechanism. There is a plugin, but it's unusable shite (tries to keep the entire data in memory, big has been open for years), and I really don't want to depend on a self-made combination of Filesystem and DB backup.
So my Nextcloud backup solution is a cron job that shuts the entire container down and runs a restic job on it, then brings it back up when the backup is complete.
I'm not completely sure that's quite "self-made"; restic is standard enough. The only special sauce is just that I don't even bother with how to handle files that are open, especially with the database. I just shut it all down.
The nice thing is this works with all my docker stuff; the cron job just iterates them one at a time, shutting them down and doing the same standard backup on them all, then bringing them up. I don't need or want a Nextcloud-specific backup mechanism.
Or you could just use some external storage. Like SMB or something. And then you would learn what updates aren't 'a breeze'. And there is no built-in SMB support in the default container.
Since I'm running it since OwnCloud days too, I have an opinion on it and it's Not. Good.
Desktop client for Windows is miserable and sucks:
a) you have something with a name longer than 30 symbols? You know need to guess what the full path of that file in the error log
b) this is like 4th year when you have an option to see the errors in a separate window, except it's... empty. Not an empty error log, it' empty window
c) Oh, best part: if the client decided to update it would kill your Explorer first (like -9), install the it's shit and then... force reboot your machine without any questions
d) when you click on the client icon in the notification area it shows multiple icons what you would thing would do something. Except it's just opens the web-interface of the instance
For years mobile client couldn't work properly with a self-signed certs, which is quite ludicrous for a solution boasted as the pinnacle of self-hosting.
UI overall is shit, it's a legacy of early 2010 concepts with Googlisation on every not needed aspect. And just outright stupid ideas, which 2.5 developers at NextCloud couldn't test, like littering EVERY (sorry for caps) folder you navigate through the web interface with README.md. And shitting bricks on non case sensitive mounts, because yes, it's hard.
Server side is always running to pump out new versions, while abandoning and deprecating addons. Oh, addon you are using is now deprecated, besides being made a mere year ago? Tough luck. Stay on the supported NC version. Except it's not supported anymore because it's a year old now version.
Oh, since 2016 it's no longer a file syncing solution, it's collaboration software or even groupware. That means there are now office suite, chat, contact lists and whatever else, including an email client. This also explains why did NC 'bought' RC. Except all those parts are not integrated good.
And finally it's a PHP app with a tons of legacy code. As soon as something breaks you are drowning in multiple screen heights of errors of PHP code. And consequently all performance troubles are solved by throwing RAM and CPU at the instance.
/rant
Finally? That's a security nightmare right there.
Roundcube is on a whole other level in terms of stability and robustness compared to Nextcloud.
I'm also glad that the current Nextcloud client will be replaced, because it's not very good right now.
no company in the world is going to maintain 2 separate software products that compete with each other. They will be merged, my prediction is 12 to 18 mos
"Neither will Roundcube replace Nextcloud Mail or the other way around. ... Nextcloud Mail will evolve as it is, focused on being used naturally within Nextcloud."
We just swapped out our old webmail system (made from twigs, mud and spit) for a nice and elegant Roundcube install with custom plugins and I was already dreading having to change it.
Some bugs I encountered in a few hours of testing and trying to make it work.
The Mac auto-update installs an incompatible version to my OS; the website offers only the new incompatible and an old version that also doesn’t work (OS can not scan the app). The solution is to find a suitable version from a hidden FTP, user-unfriendly.
Some files had modification timestamps on 1.1.1970 that causes obscure sync issues on Mac. Either run some arbitrary database scripts to fix this or a simpler solution is to ‘touch’ all affected files.
The Windows Client consistently shows random minus bytes, hangs, and freezes.
The Windows Client is stuck in a loop of calculations and transmissions. Also a reinstallation is impossible as AppData folder isn’t deleted during uninstallation.
A successful complete reinstall downloads all the existing files individually, creating conflicts with identical(!?) local and server files. Why is the file hash not checked before the download? It’s frustrating and seems poorly designed.
All bugs have open GitHub issues I didn’t bother to include. Some have open PRs for years. The last bug is open for 5 years now.
I have been using Maestral for Dropbox sync on Mac for years now and it works great. The primary downside is that it doesn't have block-level sync because it's not supported by the API. The flip side is that you don't get the memory-hungry Dropbox app that embeds a web engine for some unfathomable reason.
I wish that Dropbox would bring back their old client that just did sync and not all the crap that I don't need.
Just a month ago there was news of a RoundCube XSS zero-day that was widely exploited (https://cyberpedia.medium.com/state-sponsored-cyberattacks-l...).
Don’t use RoundCube!
All software has vulnerabilities. The trick is to install it in a way which mitigates most of the typical ones: use VMs, SELINUX/APPARMOR, containers, chroots, user separations, etc.
Edit: Yep that's the official position as per this post on the roundcube github https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/6030#issue...
Nextcloud is the OSS equivalent of IBM and ticking boxes so it's easy for management to pull the trigger but every feature is just a half-assed buggy implementation. Gobbling up OSS funds and fucking up government projects that try to rely on it. It's a disgrace.
With regards to box ticking, that is probably something you need to do if you want to compete with Gsuite and O365. Both have sales teams which are influencing some decision makers in organisations wherever they can. If you give these people the opportunity to say ‘Ha, we can’t use Nextcloud because it does not support XYZ’ then they will. You never get fired because you bought IBM. It is very difficult to get through this barrier. Sometimes you need to put a bit of lipstick on your pig, because others did it as well.
Plus, XYZ might be implemented half-aresed in Gsuite or O365 as well.
Too bad "beta quality everywhere" attitude never gets fixed. Basic stuff like weird upload indicator on the web, desktop app freezing when synching some 10GB or so and I don't even want to touch most of the third party plugins which are at alpha quality.
It's like a selfish girl that you need to treat carefully or it starts crying real fast.
I'd like to see Nextcloud adopt Roundcube's commitment to reliable software. I've tried migrating my calendars, reminders and contacts several times, but it's never worked reliably. There were often subtle problems such as missing calendar entries that simply disappeared without a trace.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundcube#Project_.22Roundcube...
[1] https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/issues/6030
Never expose any logs to strangers for anything anywhere
If I could find time to be better at self hosting and will be able to take care of a server's upkeep, security/OS/package patches/updates et cetera then if I have to setup two first tools on this it would be Syncthing and RClone.
On the other hand for my current needs I use filen.io (it's on BF sale right now). It's not the best but works fine for my use - like a remote hard disk acting like backup (its "local backup" sync mode).
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