Nextcloud as Personal Cloud – Brno Hat

enblog.eischmann.cz Nextcloud as Personal Cloud – Brno Hat

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NextCloud is a shame, they should be ashamed of calling themselves an alternative to Office365 / Teams / OneDrive. They’re pretty much like Tesla, if they didn’t spend most of their time over-promising + under-delivering people would be surprised with the progress they’ve done instead of going for scrutiny.
Here is the thing, I would love to have NC working decently but I've test almost all of their releases on the past year and the issues are always the same. Here is my main complaints:
Syncthing sync is robust, it doesn't fail and handles tons of files with little resources, NC uses a lot more RAM and once you get to around 1 TB of small files it will stop working randomly;
NC Webmail UI is poorly designed: compose window is just a small box on the center of the screen, there's no way to have the markup tools permanently show up;
NC Webmail UI is broken: if you select a bunch of text and turn it into a bullet list, the bullets won't even show up on NC, other e-mail clients will see them tho;
Integration/SSO with IMAP is cumbersome: not well documented, default configuration doesn't even handle a simple "login with the email email and password as the IMAP account" type of setup that is commonly expected;
WebUI is slow and fails often: if you open the browser console you'll find lots of warnings and errors.
I do have a lot of complaints related to mail but if NC is any kind of useful replacement for MS365 / Google Workplace a decently working webmail is the bare minimum. RoundCube is WAY better than what NC is currently offering.
I spent weeks researching and trying to tweak things and at the end of the day NC always performs poorly. Most of the issues seem to be related to the poorly implemented WebUI but the desktop app also has issues with large folders. Also tried the docker version, the "all in one" similar results it simply doesn't cut it.
With that said, for around 30 users I'm not way better with this setup:
Dovecot+Postfix working as mail server / "identity provider" for my users;
Syncthing to sync desktop machines with the server (not across each other);
FileBrowser for web access;
WebDAV access for iOS/Android clients;
Baikal as CardDAV/CalDAV server;
RoundCube for a decent webmail experience with a lot of Kolab plugins (Contacts, Calendars, Tasks from CardDAV/CalDAV);
Both FileBrowser and Baikal were modified to authenticate against the IMAP server and create accounts automatically if the username/password check out. I'm deploying this to the user's machines via Ansible and/or iOS/macOS profiles so most things are automated by now. To onboard a new user I simply have to create the email account and then run the playbooks.
My future investments will be:
ejabberd with the IMAP integration and setup plugins for audio/video chat, push notifications, presence indication;
Integrate converse.js or Jitsi (jabber web client) into the RoundCube webmail (simply add a tab with an iframe + pass the webmail auth);
Explore a better multi-user Syncthing setup - possible create a small app that uses the Syncthing tech but does authentication against IMAP as well. Custom backend to automatically manage the creation of user folders and managed shares;
Microsoft Exchange / ActiveSync: while it might be possible most of my users are either on macOS or they don't care about Outlook / use Thunderbird or the Webmail.
Although this setup still misses some important stuff (aka replace Zoom) and I've been working on it for a while it outperforms NC in all ways so far. The investment was totally worth it.
I really hoped that NC would do all those things properly and I still try new releases but it doesn't seem to get any better.
- That’s interesting, I assume you use a business use case and not a personal one? I’ve been using Nextcloud for my family and friends on an at home server and it’s been a great experience. Maybe they need to work on their scalability.
  
  I can say I get your point however 30 users isn't "scalability", it is just a normal family. I usually try to test random versions of Nextcloud from time to time to see it they've improved however I can't even make it work properly for myself let alone 30 people.
  I'm not sure what you consider "great experience" but a lagging webUI that spits dozens of warning and errors into the console doesn't cut it for me. Let alone a piece of shit webmail that isn't even capable of making a bullet list display properly or compose messages in a textarea larger than 200x200.
  
  30 as a normal family is interesting? I think most people wouldn’t consider that normal unless you’re dipping deep into cousins. However, your point is valid though that 30 does not qualify for scalability.
  That said, the webUI doesn’t lag at all for me and I have no errors or warnings in the console. No one who uses it has reported those things to me either. Are you sure you set everything up properly? I did have performance problems back when I did still have errors and warnings in my console. If your cron tasks are setup properly everything should be smooth.
  To be fair, I don’t have any experience with the webmail though.
  
  That said, the webUI doesn’t lag at all for me and I have no errors or warnings in the console.
  Maybe its just because you're not using the webmail, that thing is just poor taste.
  Are you sure you set everything up properly?
  Yes, I tried the full manual installation, docker images and whatnot, all about the same. About the lag... most time it's not the UI lagging but every action is slow, takes time to load even on high end hardware. AMD Ryzen 7 5700X + 32 GB of RAM + NVMe Samsung 980 Pro 2TB.
  
  If you’re talking about the little delays, I have experienced them, loading pages can take a second or more when I’m not on home wifi which can be frustrating at times. I think they only occur when you switch apps though.
  It’s actually funny, our hardware setups are almost identical lol. Maybe it’s something like ram or ssd speeds. Or maybe software. What OS are you running? I’m using fedora server 39 and podman instead of docker.
  The way you talk about the webmail makes it sound incredibly funny. I gotta try it out.
  
  Seems a lot more frequent to me than what you describe, but yes it can be something related to the webmail.
  Here examples of warnings and errors that are constantly spammed to the console:
  
  And there is the smallest message compose window the world has even seen:
  
  Just because "it makes sense", you're required to use an hidden menu to enable formatting tools in every single message you want to type, no global toggle available in settings:
  
  And obviously that Nextcloud wouldn't do it like any sane WYSIWYG since Office was announced in 1988. You to select text to get into the formatting tools, no way to have a permanent toolbar at the top:
  
  And of course, here it is the infamous bullets that never get rendered:
  
  If you send the email they're there, but the editor never shows them.
  And that was it, Nextcloud in 2023.
- Yeah NC is way too much bloated and heavily unstable after some long term use. As an alternative for cloud storage I use ownCloud. The newer owncloudIS version needs a bit more maturing before it's fully functional and less unstable for selfhosters, but the php version is fully functional and the native apps are awesome :).
  While AIO is neat on paper, it's most of the time buggy and not as good as native tools. Having all your tools bind together is a bad idea in my opinion... Having a hammer that's also a screwdriver, a scissor... Leave them less functional as having them separated !
  Yeah this takes more space and is less convenient, but the right tool for the right job is a principle that always works in the long term !

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