Has anything actually happened in ownClouds development?
The last I saw of them was FOSDEM a few years back, where NextCloud were handing out whitepapers and showing off their new Hub, chat, VoIP stack, group sharing system, and more. And ownCloud were sat somewhat opposite with two people and a screen showing a screenshot of a default ownCloud install, along with a big sign hanging from the ceiling saying “Join the winning team.”
What happened to owncloud dev? I wish it would be the same at nextcloud! They fully get rid of PHP. Its called OCIS and is a single binary or docker container.
OCIS is in early stage and lacks some features, but it is really easy to install and works flawlessly on low resources.
It’s great to hear that they’re not just giving up. And it’s also definitely good to hear that they’re not sticking with PHP either, that language is a true bane to modern hosting - and especially Kubernetes.
I’ll remain cautiously optimistic that they’ll be able to stay relevant, and not go hard in again on cutting away core functionality in the name of enterprise offerings - what caused the NextCloud split in the first place.
Since a couple years ago they abandoned the php version (=nextcloud) and they are in the process of a complete rewrite in go, which that means is faster and uses less resources but all existing plugins need to be rewritten too, and given the small user base nobody is going to do that.
Ooh interesting, never knew they started a rewrite!
The reports of poor performance with the PHP version was one of the things that pushed me towards using Syncthing instead when I was looking for a solution to view my documents and files from various devices
they call it “owncloud infinite scale” but for some reason they don’t clearly specify that it’s designed for performance, and it has nothing to do with the previous version. They even start the introduction page with this:
Welcome to oCIS, the modern file-sync and share platform, which is based on our knowledge and experience with the PHP based ownCloud server.
If you read that a platform is based on their knowledge and experience with PHP, would you guess that they’re talking about a complete rewrite in go?
Badly. Nextcloud is a very active project with many plugins and integrations. You can even integrate a mail system and AI image tagging, chat and video calls.
Owncloud focussed more on the enterprise sector and less on fancy features. Definitely the more stable product (but not only in the positive sense).
I tried NC recently (like 2 weeks ago) and fuck me it’s an awful piece of shit, full-stop. It broke completely 3x during initial setup, needing a container wipe and beginning from scratch each time, then I was following the official docs and the ‘status / security’ page of the admin area where it told me to do something that had no gui (so they are 100% aware anyone new has to do this but cba to throw it a fucking web page) and if you edit the config file on the machine directly, even if you stop the container, it breaks permissions (???) so you have to download it from your server, edit, and re-upload it (somehow doesn’t break permissions???). This took an hour to figure out, the doc was useless.
Then you get to the plug-in page and fuck me could this be any worse. Pick one fucking category each, guys, I don’t need to see 40% of the same available plug-ins on almost every fucking category, jesus fucking christ. Then you dive into these things and you realize how surface-level they are - a task/to-do list should have a fucking import/export function, as well as REPEATING OPTIONS fuck me sideways are you seriously taking the piss. You’ll be setting up other plug-ins and they don’t actually function at all even though they have been verified to work with your version (medical plug in, for example) and it just keeps crumbling around you the further you go. Shit, even the weather widget on the ‘home page’ will show C instead of F when you select a country during account setup that uses F, with NO OBVIOUS WAY TO CHANGE THAT. The fix? Go through your region options, pick a different country, then back to your actual. Does NOBODY EVEN TEST THIS SHIT? How are they on version SIX of their ‘hub’?! This screams alpha, not multiple-stable-releases!
I did never have any problems with installing it, but once or twice with upgrading. And I agree with you that the setup is complex with all the possible options and getting it to run well takes some time.
When it comes to the apps, Nextcloud is a very open system. Its easy to publish an app, and the quality of the apps varies. Some apps are abandoned and don’t work in recent versions. Personally, I would recommend to keep the number of apps low for stability and security reasons.
The update process is absolutely horrible, especially with containers.
I seriously cannot understand how this hasn’t been fixed ages ago. Upgrading is kind of important and nextcloud isn’t doing that much weird stuff that it didn’t upgrade itself.
That was the case for me. I had a nextcloud setup with a few productivity apps (calendar, contacts, notes, some 3rd party). In one case I forgot to deactivate apps before update and it crashed. In another case I deactivated it first to find out they are partially not usable anymore after update.
Now I try it with one container app for one use case (seafile, baikal etc.).
I’ve been self-hosting since before docker and containers were a thing, and even though Nextcloud kinda pushes their container images these days, I still refuse to use them, and use the community archive releases or web installer when reconfiguring my system or setting up a new system to migrate to. Maybe it’s just Nextcloud and the other software I use, or maybe it’s just that I’m not really trying to build scalable server infrastructure with a lot of users, but I generally find that docker causes more problems than it solves, and it does my head in when I see projects that recommend containers as the primary suggested install method.
Totally agree with your assessment of the plugins/apps systems. Feels like you need to stick to official “apps” and hope they don’t get abandoned to have anything close to a good experience because even minor updates can break all the 3rd party apps because of a compatibility check, where you end up waiting for the app developer to release an “update” that only changes the version compatibility number.
Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.
This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.
Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.
Not saying there aren’t any benefits to docker, migration to a different host distro and dependency conflicts are the big two. But for me they are kinda the only two, I find for what I do it’s just as easy to write a shell script that downloads and unpacks software, and copies my own config files into place than it is to deal with basically doing the same thing, but with docker. I could use ansible or something similar for that, but for me, shell scripts are easier to manage.
Don’t get me wrong, docker has its place. I just find that it gets in my way with it’s own quirks almost as much as it helps in other areas, especially for web apps like Nextcloud that are already just a single folder under the web root and a database.
One additional benefit I get from not using docker, is that I can do more with a lower-powered server, since I’m not running multiple instances of PHP and nginx across multiple containers.
That was my pet peeve too. I installed it some years ago. Months went by, I’ve used it. Then I saw a new version came out. Okay, time to upgrade! Oh, dump the DB, delete everything, install the upgrade and load the DB back? (Or some similar shit.) And do it every time when there is an upgrade? Okay, uninstall it is.
Eek - I’m trying to host services for family and friends, and while I have raid1, snapshots, 3-2-1 backups, etc I’m still very concerned about having a db or other large data corruption occur.
Part of the problem is you don’t understand how containers work. If you need to do a ‘container wipe’ and starting from scratch, you’re doing it wrong.
I’ve been running nextcloud in k8s for years and running a few occ upgrade commands after an upgrade is annoying but not the end of the world.
Yeah, exactly. If you’re starting over from scratch constantly you’re doing something wrong. Check out docs.docker.com/storage/ for a few options on how you should be managing your storage.
This is the only container I’ve had anywhere near the amount of trouble with, others it’s just pulling a new image or something. I’ve been doing docker for like 5 years now, NC was just awful. Shouldn’t need to nuke anything while you’re still in the initial service setup phase…
Ooooor it will become a free vs corporate solution like RedHat and the likes do.
Portainer also does it for example. I think LDAP-Auth is paywalled but it makes sense that features like that are.
It might be, but in the history of that corp, they never had a free/community/oss project. It looks like the typical Embrace Extend Extinguish strategy, where you acquire competitors just to get their customer base instead of the real product. OC 10 it’s already dead (no php 8 support) and ocis has almost no plugins.
Didn’t know about their history.
If that was the case: Fun while it lasted. Havent used it thus far but I wasn’t against the situation if it justified the use of it.
Yes! As soon as your homelab grows above a couple of services and especially if it's used by two or more people SSO becomes an absolute necessity! The tolerance of non-technical users for handling a bunch of passwords and having to enter them everywhere is understandably low.
The Home Assistant devs apparently also deal SSO as "a corporate feature that big-corp interests want to force onto us" whereas it's the exact opposite in many cases: If we want self hosted services to be a realistic alternative to the "big corpo offerings" then we have to consider convenience and security an important feature and SSO is one of the few things that improves both at the same time.
Idk why you’d need LDAP login as the admin for a homelab.
For other things like owncloud it makes sense but not there but eh…Personal preference I guess.
I have something like 40-60 machines between hypervisors, VM, and physical. Central auth is an absolute must for that scale. Sure I could just re use the same password 60 times, but if that gets popped, I’d also have to change it 60 times (adding config management is a soon to be completed task)
Actually, I legally can’t make money off of it for reasons that would dox me.
I already pay for both VMware and Microsoft licensing among several others. If I can get my SSO by saving a little bit of money by using a different product, I will. I don’t mind paying for software I use when it makes sense, I only disagree with companies up-charging features like SSO that should be available to all customers.
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