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As an admin of a 500 user instance I'm having mixed feelings about Nextcloud. Sure it's GPL and free and it got a lot better than the old owncloud mess that bro

by nisa 8y ago

As an admin of a 500 user instance I'm having mixed feelings about Nextcloud. Sure it's GPL and free and it got a lot better than the old owncloud mess that broke always but it's still somewhat a gamble. My install is just a no-warranty, non-commercial use case and I wouldn't use it for any large commercial installation without having at least one dedicated and skilled PHP-dev on-site. I came to resent their marketing blog posts. If you look it's just an alpha version that just got hacked together, often with problems, often not fixed long after the release. There still lot's of serious bugs in end to end encryption for instance. There does not seem to be a lot of work to improve the base features. Syncing, ACLs, User Mangement leave a lot to be desired. It's not easy but they are in a position where they really could be a perfect solution for a lot of people and probably also charge good money for it - but at the moment it feels like they just build alpha-grade fancy addons. Me and probably most users would love a no-feature, we just fix the most serious bugs on our github issues release-cycle. I'm fine when it's called Nextcloud 16 and takes a year, hell take your time, but basic functionality should be rock solid. I also don't get why they ignore the existing open-source ecosystem. Make it possible to integrate SOGo for Calenders and Mail - it's all webdav in the browser anyway. SOGo at least has somewhat working ActiveSync. Same with SAML/Shibboleth/Kerberos - some things got fixed, very late. No deployment story for Active Directory or even Linux. User management is a mess - the Circles app is a good idea that is crippled by usability and functionality bugs... that possibility to have self-selecting groups and decentralized management is a huge win for them, but they don't seem to realize that this is an important use-case. Nextcloud is very close to what would be ideal for a lot of smaller organisations, but they somehow are unable to polish what they have but decided to pile alpha-quality on alpha-quality code (and ignore the bug reports)... That beeing said, it mostly works but your users won't be happy.

jospoortvliet 8y ago
Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers. If you're not either, we might not do what you want... That's the reality of any open source project. And you're right, for a large installation, you should obviously get an onsite engineer, or, much better, a contract with us which is both cheaper and better. That's what most larger installations do, and that is how we earn the money to make Nextcloud better. WRT the E2E, that sadly took a whole lot longer to get working than we had expected. Of course, if you think it is important or need it, time and money can speed it up, we have only so much of those.
- SJk7TAy 8y ago
  Why do you say that a release with only stabilization brings you more users but not customers? Wouldn't the quality word-of-mouth convince more businesses to switch? And I assume they need professional support anyhow, don't they? Another Nextcloud enthusiast and (very small) contributor here. Thank you for the awesome work you and the team do :)
- jchw 8y ago
  GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.
  - dsumenkovic 8y ago
    Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure). There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.
- kop316 8y ago
  I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case. If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development" I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given the option to.
mnutt 8y ago
My knowledge is a year or two out of date, but I think “it’s all just webdav” is part of the problem, and they sort of painted themselves into a corner by using it as a protocol. They ended up with a bunch of extra API hacks on top of WebDAV for things like multiparty uploads, and things still go wonky if you try to connect a random WebDAV client to it. I built an ownCloud file storage replacement that worked with their front end client, while it was all technically WebDAV, syncing issues were a nightmare. I have a great amount of respect for how much effort they put into getting WebDAV to work, I just think it’s not not as solid/specified a protocol as one would hope.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  The synchronization is a nightmare. The C++ client is hard to figure out, and even harder to maintain as a customized solution. Worse, they don't get the usual benefit of C++ clients being lean and resource-friendly because they now ship with an embedded QT Webbrowser.
  - guruz 8y ago
    You should try the ownCloud client instead. It works just fine with Nextcloud as server and has less bloat than the Nextcloud-branded client. https://github.com/owncloud/client/releases/tag/v2.5.1 https://github.com/owncloud/client/releases/tag/v2.5.1 Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of the the ownCloud desktop client.
    - jospoortvliet 8y ago
      Of course, you lose support for 2FA, have crappy notifications and activity feed and so on, plus it is entirely unsupported so I'd recommend against that...
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    While there is certainly a point about electron apps wasting resources, an electron app would be a lot more maintainable and the GUI could be improved a lot. For example it's impossible to know which errors are actually a problem, and if synchronization was successful or aborted. Some of the progress information is in a tooltip which changes a couple of times per second.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
I had to deploy Nextcloud at work for a couple dozen users and it was a nightmare. There was zero response to any bug reports / questions I had. I even tried to get commercial support, and they wouldn't answer. The client is effectively a black box, and we can't even get synchronization to work correctly. Some of it certainly is the fault of me or the users. But some of it probably isn't, and it's hard to tell the difference, what with nobody responding to bug reports.
- jospoortvliet 8y ago
  Hi, Sorry to hear about the bad experience, that shouldn't happen. We explicitly design Nextcloud to be seamless for small installations like yours - but if you need support, you can simply purchase it directly on https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/buy/ https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/buy/ so you don't need to wait for sales people. We'll fix your issues for sure. Keep in mind: using a bog-standard LAMP stack is your best bet, but you can always add the 1-day installation help to let an expert guide you through the decisions on how to integrate in your infrastructure. We have hundreds of customers with literally tens of millions of users deployed, so by now pretty much every problem has been seen and can be fixed ;-)
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    Oh, I can totally recommend to my boss forking out at least 2000€ for commercial support by people who take two weeks to respond to any sales requests without knowing if these problems are actually fixable...
amaccuish 8y ago
Spot on. As an admin the saml situation was a nightmare: it took so long for them to update the saml library, so for a time it wasn't even compatible with their docker images because the library version they were using required mbstring, while many moons ago an updated version of the lib was released upstream without the need for mbstring. I still can't get ss-logout to work either. We use SOGo as well, and at some point I will get around to integrating SAML into sogo, so at least when users click on the "external sites app" icon for SOGo, they'll be signed in automatically. Either that or add support to use external contacts and calendar dav servers. I feel like in general there will come a point where PHP's execute and die model won't do. I really wish they'd implement some sort of backend daemon to carry out long running tasks.
the_common_man 8y ago
Similar situation with LDAP as well. The first login of a new user results in a crash. They haven't fixed this issue in 3 months.
- jospoortvliet 8y ago
  Sorry to hear it broke. Try logging a support ticket on portal.nextcloud.com. LDAP is an enterprise feature so it is an area where we strongly focus on customers and their issues first, and if none of our customers experience this problem it can take a long time to get resolved as we're always very busy...
  - fbartels 8y ago
    My guess he is referring to https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/12693 https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/12693, which sits there as a pr for 16 days now (even though it was opened from one of the nextcloud core team afaik).
gHacxZ5e 8y ago
Don't use the old ownCloud mess, use the new one. I'm currently running ownCloud 10 and it works great. The stability and architecture of the project have really improved in the last years. It seems to be scalable too, when you look at the big organizations running ownCloud. All the know-how and feedback of the big instances is flowing into ownCloud, not nextcloud. Speaks for alpha-quality. I have not tried the migration from nextcloud to ownCloud yet, but it should not be too hard.
- jospoortvliet 8y ago
  ownCloud seems to be going for hosting small and medium sized businesses, I'm not sure what that means for big organizations in the future. Our customers tend to be bigger, actually. Like the German federal government with 300K users, companies like Siemens, german Radio & TV stations (transferring over 1TB/day!). Our biggest deployment (in a single instance) is over 20 million users - see nextcloud.com/globalscale for how we pull that off. ownCloud has no equivalent solution for such installations and breaks down at about 50K users. For home users or very small businesses, the difference might not be that big but the migrations we do for customers show time and again that there is a big improvement in performance and reliability, especially on large installations.
  - jospoortvliet 8y ago
    ... and now I see I probably replied to a sockpuppet account. Sigh sorry for the noise.

by nisa 8y ago

jospoortvliet 8y ago

Let's be honest, if we did a release with only stabilization, it might get us more users. Not more customers. And it is customers who pay for the development. Everyone asks us to focus "on the basics" and then claim their pet feature requests are, of course, basics. ACL's and user mgmt in your case, perfectly fine features, but features nonetheless. In the end, our development is guided by the community and customers. If you're not either, we might not do what you want... That's the reality of any open source project. And you're right, for a large installation, you should obviously get an onsite engineer, or, much better, a contract with us which is both cheaper and better. That's what most larger installations do, and that is how we earn the money to make Nextcloud better. WRT the E2E, that sadly took a whole lot longer to get working than we had expected. Of course, if you think it is important or need it, time and money can speed it up, we have only so much of those.

SJk7TAy 8y ago
Why do you say that a release with only stabilization brings you more users but not customers? Wouldn't the quality word-of-mouth convince more businesses to switch? And I assume they need professional support anyhow, don't they? Another Nextcloud enthusiast and (very small) contributor here. Thank you for the awesome work you and the team do :)
jchw 8y ago
GitLab seems to suffer from a similar conundrum, and they also seem to have gained a reputation for being unstable. Which is sad. In my experience, GitLab is very stable, nowadays, but it will probably never fully recover from its first impressions for some people.
- dsumenkovic 8y ago
  Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate your feedback about GitLab. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure). There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.
kop316 8y ago
I use Nextcloud and it is an integral part of my life, but your current set up does not allow me to pay you, as it focuses only on enterprise use case. If I may make a suggestion, could you make a page for donation, and then you can have a "put your donation to Nextcloud to the following uses: - New features - Stablilty - Android Client development" I think you get the idea. I would very happily donate if I was given the option to.

mnutt 8y ago

My knowledge is a year or two out of date, but I think “it’s all just webdav” is part of the problem, and they sort of painted themselves into a corner by using it as a protocol. They ended up with a bunch of extra API hacks on top of WebDAV for things like multiparty uploads, and things still go wonky if you try to connect a random WebDAV client to it. I built an ownCloud file storage replacement that worked with their front end client, while it was all technically WebDAV, syncing issues were a nightmare. I have a great amount of respect for how much effort they put into getting WebDAV to work, I just think it’s not not as solid/specified a protocol as one would hope.

bayesian_horse 8y ago
The synchronization is a nightmare. The C++ client is hard to figure out, and even harder to maintain as a customized solution. Worse, they don't get the usual benefit of C++ clients being lean and resource-friendly because they now ship with an embedded QT Webbrowser.
- guruz 8y ago
  You should try the ownCloud client instead. It works just fine with Nextcloud as server and has less bloat than the Nextcloud-branded client. https://github.com/owncloud/client/releases/tag/v2.5.1 https://github.com/owncloud/client/releases/tag/v2.5.1 Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of the the ownCloud desktop client.
  - jospoortvliet 8y ago
    Of course, you lose support for 2FA, have crappy notifications and activity feed and so on, plus it is entirely unsupported so I'd recommend against that...
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  While there is certainly a point about electron apps wasting resources, an electron app would be a lot more maintainable and the GUI could be improved a lot. For example it's impossible to know which errors are actually a problem, and if synchronization was successful or aborted. Some of the progress information is in a tooltip which changes a couple of times per second.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

I had to deploy Nextcloud at work for a couple dozen users and it was a nightmare. There was zero response to any bug reports / questions I had. I even tried to get commercial support, and they wouldn't answer. The client is effectively a black box, and we can't even get synchronization to work correctly. Some of it certainly is the fault of me or the users. But some of it probably isn't, and it's hard to tell the difference, what with nobody responding to bug reports.

jospoortvliet 8y ago
Hi, Sorry to hear about the bad experience, that shouldn't happen. We explicitly design Nextcloud to be seamless for small installations like yours - but if you need support, you can simply purchase it directly on https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/buy/ https://nextcloud.com/enterprise/buy/ so you don't need to wait for sales people. We'll fix your issues for sure. Keep in mind: using a bog-standard LAMP stack is your best bet, but you can always add the 1-day installation help to let an expert guide you through the decisions on how to integrate in your infrastructure. We have hundreds of customers with literally tens of millions of users deployed, so by now pretty much every problem has been seen and can be fixed ;-)
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Oh, I can totally recommend to my boss forking out at least 2000€ for commercial support by people who take two weeks to respond to any sales requests without knowing if these problems are actually fixable...

amaccuish 8y ago

Spot on. As an admin the saml situation was a nightmare: it took so long for them to update the saml library, so for a time it wasn't even compatible with their docker images because the library version they were using required mbstring, while many moons ago an updated version of the lib was released upstream without the need for mbstring. I still can't get ss-logout to work either. We use SOGo as well, and at some point I will get around to integrating SAML into sogo, so at least when users click on the "external sites app" icon for SOGo, they'll be signed in automatically. Either that or add support to use external contacts and calendar dav servers. I feel like in general there will come a point where PHP's execute and die model won't do. I really wish they'd implement some sort of backend daemon to carry out long running tasks.

the_common_man 8y ago

Similar situation with LDAP as well. The first login of a new user results in a crash. They haven't fixed this issue in 3 months.

jospoortvliet 8y ago
Sorry to hear it broke. Try logging a support ticket on portal.nextcloud.com. LDAP is an enterprise feature so it is an area where we strongly focus on customers and their issues first, and if none of our customers experience this problem it can take a long time to get resolved as we're always very busy...
- fbartels 8y ago
  My guess he is referring to https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/12693 https://github.com/nextcloud/server/pull/12693, which sits there as a pr for 16 days now (even though it was opened from one of the nextcloud core team afaik).

gHacxZ5e 8y ago

Don't use the old ownCloud mess, use the new one. I'm currently running ownCloud 10 and it works great. The stability and architecture of the project have really improved in the last years. It seems to be scalable too, when you look at the big organizations running ownCloud. All the know-how and feedback of the big instances is flowing into ownCloud, not nextcloud. Speaks for alpha-quality. I have not tried the migration from nextcloud to ownCloud yet, but it should not be too hard.

jospoortvliet 8y ago
ownCloud seems to be going for hosting small and medium sized businesses, I'm not sure what that means for big organizations in the future. Our customers tend to be bigger, actually. Like the German federal government with 300K users, companies like Siemens, german Radio & TV stations (transferring over 1TB/day!). Our biggest deployment (in a single instance) is over 20 million users - see nextcloud.com/globalscale for how we pull that off. ownCloud has no equivalent solution for such installations and breaks down at about 50K users. For home users or very small businesses, the difference might not be that big but the migrations we do for customers show time and again that there is a big improvement in performance and reliability, especially on large installations.
- jospoortvliet 8y ago
  ... and now I see I probably replied to a sockpuppet account. Sigh sorry for the noise.