[Brainspackle]

someone please help me understand all the hype about nextcloud. I've tried it and found it to be a bloated mess. Why would I want to run this over several smaller apps that do the job better, just without a fancy (if you could call it that) UI to tie it all together

[kmclean]

For me it was just the convenience of being able to have most of my cloud things in one place (like calendar, reminders, contacts, notes, etc). I suspect it's probably not the best solution for each of those individually, and I'm definitely curious what other options are out there, but it's quite a convenient drop-in replacement for a lot of Google's cloud offerings for people who are looking for alternatives. Also I should note I don't actually ever use the nextcloud UI itself, I don't disagree it can feel a bit clunky sometimes. I use 3rd party clients and use my personal cloud to sync everything via webDAV and cardDAV.

[JadoJodo]

Agreed. I used it for about two months and spent dozens of hours trying to help friends/family troubleshoot random glitches the clients had, the unintuitive encryption settings and hugely underwhelming performance that comes with S3-type storage. I loved the idea but it really is a bloated mess and I couldn’t trust it to work when I needed it to.

[canofbars]

Tried remote storage and its slow like you mention, but once I ran it on a ryzen desktop with a hdd for storage the whole thing is incredibly fast and works great.

[indigodaddy]

It seems to have remained quite popular, so there must be reasons why people like it. Someone else just replied “less maintenance,” but I think a lot of it does have to do with a single webpage/all-in-one portal type application where you can do all the “my things” at. Eg, sandstorm is in that sort of category. It is pretty convenient. Note I have played around with sandstorm but never used next cloud. And sandstorm is very different too, don’t want to get too carried away in comparing them.

[mkl]

Sandstorm was a neat idea, but unfortunately it seems like it is nearly dead: https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis

> As much as I love Sandstorm, it’s hard to come home from my successful day job to work on an unsuccessful side project. And so, I have been spending less and less time on Sandstorm. I still push updates every month to keep the dependencies fresh, but hadn’t worked on any new features in about a year and a half before adding mass transfers recently.

> Meanwhile, without leadership, the community has mostly disbanded. The only app that gets regular updates anymore is Wekan, thanks to its maintainer Lauri “xet7” Ojansivu. Jake Weisz heroically continues to carry the Sandstorm flag, reviewing app submissions (mostly from Lauri), replying to questions and bug reports, and advocating Sandstorm around the internet. A couple others lurk on the mailing list and IRC. Most people have moved on.

> Almost all the app packages are from 2015-2016; many of those apps have had significant updates in their standalone versions since then which are missing on Sandstorm.

[kenniskrag]

link: https://sandstorm.io/

[bassman9000]

bloated mess

Same. Setting up v20 for a customer these days. Heavy, slow. Buggy LDAP. Not easily containerized: official Docker image tries to rsync ALL the distribution from /usr to /var/www/html every time your start run the container, and you can't mount individual volumes (e.g. just data), because they keep the config at /var/www/html/config.php

Customer just wants a UI for a filesystem, and I'd gladly replace it if I could.

[sean_pedersen]

I concur. I am happy with my lean setup:

- SyncThing: decentralized, fast & unix aligned

- CryptPad: end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing

[canofbars]

It just works and does everything. I run it on a ryzen "server" and its super snappy and does everything I need. Its the glue between my apple and linux devices which makes interacting with files between them almost seamless.

[j45]

Low / no maintenance of services and software is huge.

The cloud seems maintenance free until the plan or features change or go away altogether.

[kenniskrag]

less maintanance? Which apps do you use?

[DarthGhandi]

Wondering what you use instead?

I run nextcloud on a $5 vps just like in this article, it's still underutilised. Out of the box my family can have access to certain folders and their own account, they can watch videos in the browser and I can have a selfhosted google docs/sheets alternative. All encrypted at rest.