A good thing thing about Nextcloud is that by learning one tool, you get a full suite of collaboration apps: sync, file sharing, calendar, notes, collectives, office (via Collabora or OnlyOffice), and more. These features are pretty good, plus, you get things like photo management and Talk, which are decent.
Sure, some people might argue that there are specialized tools for each of these functions. And that’s true. But the tradeoff is that you'd need to manage a lot more with individual services. With Nextcloud, you get a unified platform that might be good enough to run a company, even if it’s not very fast and some features might have bugs.
The AIO has addressed issues like update management and reliability, it been very good in my experience. You get a fully tested, ready-to-go package from Nextcloud.
That said, I wonder, if the platform were rewritten in a more performance-efficient language than PHP, with a simplified codebase and trimmed-down features, would it run faster? The UI could also be more polished (see Synology DSM web interface). The interface in Synology looks really nice!
rewriting in a lower-level language won't do too much for NC, because it's mostly slow due to inefficient IO organization - things like mountains of XHRs, inefficient fetching, db querying etc. - None of that will be implicitly fixed by a rewrite in any language and can be fixed in the PHP stack as well. I think one of the reasons that helped OC/NC get off the ground was precisely that the sysadmins running it can often do a little PHP, which is just enough to get it customized for the client. Raising the bar for contribution by using lower level languages might not be a desirable change of direction in that case.
The thing I don't get is that based on the article the front-end is as bloated as the back-end.
That said there's an Owncloud version called Infinite Scale which is written in Go.[1] Honestly I tried to go that route but it's requirements are pretty opinionated (Ubuntu LTS 22.04 or 24.04 and lots of docker containers littering your system) but it looks like it's getting a lot of development.
[1] https://doc.owncloud.com/
Most of the OCIS team left to start OpenCloud, which is a OCIS fork. And it's hardware requirements are pretty tame. It's a very nice replacement for Nextcloud, if you don't need the Groupware features/Apps and are only looking for File sharing.
Holy cow this looks awesome. I'm digging in now.
> it's requirements are pretty opinionated (Ubuntu LTS 22.04 or 24.04
Hm?
> This guide describes an installation of Infinite Scale based on Ubuntu LTS and docker compose. The underlying hardware of the server can be anything as listed below as long it meets the OS requirements defined in the Software Stack
https://doc.owncloud.com/ocis/next/depl-examples/ubuntu-comp...
The Software Stack section goes on to say it's just needs Docker, Docker Compose, shell access, and sudo.
Ubuntu and sudo are probably only mentioned because the guide walks you through installing docker and docker compose.
If the developers can only get it to run in a pile of ubuntu containers, then it's extremely likely they haven't thought through basic things you need to operate a service, like supply chain security, deterministic builds, unit testing, upgrades, etc.
I see 6 officially supported linux distributions. I don't know where anyone got the idea that they can only get it to run on ubuntu. It's containerized. Who cares what the host os is, beyond "it can run containers"?
Here's where I got it from: https://doc.owncloud.com/ocis/next/depl-examples/ubuntu-comp...
And I wish it was "containerized" but really it's "dockerized" as this thread demonstrates: https://central.owncloud.org/t/owncloud-docker-image-with-ro...
So yeah like I said in my original comment, for personal use it's just not right for me (because I choose not to use docker in my personal projects), but I hope it's right for other people because it looks like a killer app.
I'd definitely like to see what other options are available on other distros so I'll dig through their documentation more.
I think what you're looking at is: "Here's an example of installing this on ubuntu 24.04. These instructions will also work on 22.04." This is in no way saying they can only get it to work on ubuntu; they just haven't written a step-by-step example like this for other distributions.
And yeah, trying to use podman with something that's based on docker compose is ... probably gonna give you some headaches, I'd guess. I don't particularly know the pitfalls but if you're expecting it to be transparently swappable, I don't think that's an owncloud issue.
I agree -- they chose their platform (docker), and for my personal work that just isn't my platform, and it's probably unfair for me to call them "opinionated" about that (because like it or not Docker is the norm) or about Ubuntu, especially in light of where I was getting my information from.
I've seen some flame in this community, but damn this thread has just been a bunch of polite people helping correct the record.
Your second link appears to be about OwnCloud, not OwnCloud Infinite Scale.