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.
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:
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 !
My University runs a huge Nextcloud Enterprise Instance, which runs perfectly fine. So maybe there is different code for the enterprise version, or you are inept as it seems to run at many large organizations just fine
Anyway… I figured out a workaround in my script. By focusing one of the windows on the current workspace before I open a new tab it seems to make it the preferred window. It’s not foolproof, sometimes it still selects one of the other windows, but it’s close enough.
Here’s the script in case anybody needs it, should work with any editor that has some sort of -tab and -window options if you grep for the correct window name:
Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they? Plasma will happily show information about connections managed by something else than NetworkManager, but won’t be able to manage them itself. But desktop distributions will most likely ship it as it covers basically all use cases.
Neither GNOME nor Plasma depend on NetworkManager, do they?
Not directly, but distros may choose to create a dependency.
On Debian, installing recommended dependencies is enabled by default and disabling them can lead to all sorts of errors and missing functionality.
gnome-shell recommends gnome-control-center, which recommends network-manager-gnome, which depends on network-manager.
So unless you go out of your way to install a very minimal system, it gets pulled in.
From my point of view, nothing else but NetworkManager makes sense to ship by default for a distribution aimed at desktop use. So I fully understand distributions doing this. My point was rather that this is not related to any particular WM / DE.
I don’t think so. Dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant is really light, suitable for light installers, and live USB stick images.
I’ve been using dhcpcd + wpa_supplicant for so long… I do understand currently users prefer NM, but I hope there’s no push for it to be the unique way to manage network connectivity, and on light installers, I hope I’m not force to use NM either.
use kali Linux in a virtual machine because haha funny 1337 haxor
install mint/popOS/ubuntu on either a virtual machin, a spare laptop, or dual boot if you have a spare drive
I used mint for school and random tinkering and just gradually got more familiar with the random things I wanted to do or fix
this was last year so I’m no where near qualified to talk like a guru of ancient wisdom, take all of this with a grain of salt or possibly just burn it
Easy mode: LMDE/Mint. They are all geared towards a good user experience and trying to keep you out of the terminal. I would recommend them to any new Linux user.
For a slightly more advanced experience, Debian with XFCE as the desktop. The installation is slightly less friendly and they expect you to be familiar with using the terminal and tinkering with the guts of your OS from time to time but you can have a ‘lighter’ installation with less background services. (I run Debian on all my machines so I have a bias towards Debian and LMDE).
It’s really hard to [accidentally] permanently break Linux to the point of requiring a reinstall.
Here’s a really good tip: Keep a live distro (I use Mint) on a USB drive. If something real bad happens, you can boot into the live distro, and chroot into your OS and do the repairs you need. While also having a live distro with web access and a browser to help.
I broke my GRUB once (or twice) and fixed it again this way.
Keep a backup of your /boot folder, GRUB (or equivalent) configs, etc, also check documentation on Arch wiki for boot process. 99.9% of the time you should be able to fix things to at least get to a TTY after boot.
I think you could install your system using a generic kernel, package it up as ISO and just boot it on basically any other machine with the same architecture. Proprietary bits like NVidia driver and firmware could pose a problem.
That’s basically what a live USB is.
Yes, my order status has been at preparing to ship for awhile now. I been wanting a good Linux tablet to replace aging iPad and hoping this works well enough for me. I’ll try to remember to update post on how I like it when it does arrive.
I think there would be a way to test it with docker, you could find a image that has systemd installed and use something like distrobox to test it with the GUI.
I’m pretty familiar with Linux server management, but haven’t ran Linux on the desktop in a very long time (I still remember the days of XFree86, which was the predecessor to X.org). If I install a mainstream desktop distro today (Ubuntu, Mint, whatever is popular now), does it come with X11 or Wayland out-of-the-box?
Depends on which DE in which version it is using, but anything with recent Gnome (Fedora, Ubuntu) will. Not sure if KDE distros generally default to it, and for more niche DEs the answer is probably “no”, unless it was explicitly made for Wayland.
In looking up suggestions made already I found 2 other projects that might be useful. Does anyone have comments about these? I have just looked at them a little bit.
OfflineIMAP
OfflineIMAP is software that downloads your email mailbox(es) as local Maildirs. OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.
There are a few different overlapping projects by same developer(s). It is a bit messy.
OfflineIMAP/offlineimap3 - I think this repo is the one with the most active and up to date version of the software
Imapsync is an IMAP transfer tool. The purpose of imapsync is to migrate IMAP accounts or to backup IMAP accounts.
Imapsync is a command-line tool that allows incremental and recursive IMAP transfers from one mailbox to another, both anywhere on the internet or in your local network. Imapsync runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X. “Incremental” means you can stop the transfer at any time and restart it later efficiently, without generating duplicates.
I think the real issue with audio work on Linux is the complexity of getting things working. MacOS and Windows are both much easier to work in with dealing with audio stuff and much like Adobe 's stranglehold on potential converts having to jump through so many hoops for an arguably worse experience really keeps some people at bay.
Oh yeah you’re right there, but what I’m getting at is having a system that does everything you want is, I would assume, preferred. I run Pop and have it setup with my Audient EVO and it works well with Reaper, but getting it to that point was a pain.
If you're choosing to do audio production in Linux, the odds are that "easy" wasn't your top decision criteria. lol
Personally, I recently hooked up my Berhinger USB audio interface to Mint, and Ardour and Audacity saw it immediately. I was impressed. I was ready to google around for how to use lusb and dmseg and shit because I never remember what I'm doing.
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