I decided that I will update the nextcloud (windows) desktop client once or twice a decade

I’ve enough.

Last year the automatic updater was rebooting windows without any warning after the uac prompt. The problem continued for months before being fixed

This year I got an update a week. Very annoying to get the same “why u no reboot? I need updates” question every single time I turn on my PC.

Today when updating it kills explorer.exe without any confirmation and doesn’t bring it back to life.

I don’t think that their paid enterprise customers are doing the beta alpha testers like this. Is it really necessary to push nightlies to end users? It can’t be tested casually for a couple of days then pushed?

I disabled the updates check and will update the nextcloud desktop client manually every 5 years if I can remember. Added an exception to Winget so it doesn’t update it. I lost my patience.

simon574,

I’ve used both self-hosted Nextcloud, and an instance set up by my school. I have the client on two different Windows machines, and I can confirm the update either tries to kill explorer.exe, which doesn’t work half of the time, or forces a restart, so you’re not alone with this issue! I also hate the client UI and how it displays conflicted files when multiple people are accessing the same folder. The whole file sync thing feels like a poor attempt to copy Dropbox. My school discontinued Nextcloud support last year because hosting/maintenance took too many resources, they switched to Microsoft i.e. OneDrive and it works much better.

MangoPenguin,
@MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Just switch to Syncthing, I ditched Nextcloud years ago after many issues with both the desktop client and the server, 2 of them leading to complete data loss. It’s slow, bloated, poorly made and full of bugs.

If you need a web based file manager you can set up Syncthing on your server and run Filebrowser or similar. As a bonus it’s like 10x faster than nextcloud to use. If you need WebDAV then SFTPGo provides that nicely.

MonkderZweite,

Should install your apps with Scoop or Chocolatey anyway. Easy to update and without all the bullshit the usual installer wants to shove down your throat.

Moonrise2473,

Installed via Winget, the problem is that the installer is buggy and crashes explorer.exe leaving the system in an unrecoverable state (even if you run it again via taskmgr, the menu bar is broken)

MonkderZweite,

Yeah, i left winget out on purpose, becaus MS literally stole it from appget and still managed to make it bad.

mranderson17,

Ok, I’m prepared to be downvoted today so here goes.

Nextcloud is an enterprise cloud suite. The one you run in docker on your rpi (or whatever) is the same one that is run at a company, albeit with more high availability and redundancy, but the same application, proxies, caching, db, etc. Nothing is stopping you from running the stable channel and testing your upgrades, or even rolling out specific stable client versions to your devices.

Said companies often have teams (more than one person) to run it, stage upgrades, automated testing, automated backups, monitoring, etc. They go to work and do just that, maybe not every day but at least a couple times a week their focus is Nextcloud and only Nextcloud.

What many people in the self hosting community do is spin up docker, without ever having touched docker before, and try to run Nextcloud, forget that it exists, and then upgrade it a year later across multiple versions without maintaining the database. Then they obsess about how fast an app loads by refreshing it a whole bunch, and then complain on internet forums that it sucks. This, like many posts, doesn’t have a specific problem for us to help with, no logs or stack traces have been posted, and the subject of the complaint shows just how terrible your understanding of application security is.

So, while there is legitimate criticism of some of Nextcloud’s design choices, this isn’t it. And at the risk of sounding a little gatekeepy, if you post “nextcloud updates break everything” with no context you probably should spend some time gaining a better understanding of how internet facing services work and make an attempt to fix the problem (probably misconfiguration, and in this desktop client case probably a heap of un-updated local software installed alongside the client), which I’m sure people would find if they did the bare minimum of reading a few log files or any of the other things that come with being an application admin.

Moonrise2473,

You’re right but if an installer renders a computer inoperable until reboot (tried in another PC, same result, doesn’t only kill explorer.exe because if I run it again via taskmgr, the taskbar is broken and non functional until reboot) it means it has been pushed to the “stable” channel without being tested a single time.

The problem is present since 2021 and it’s a bit ridiculous now github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/3551

In the topic you can see the devs “ok fixed in next release” => next release didn’t fix it (=nobody actually clicked the exe before releasing, it just passed all automated tests), then “ok so next release gonna fix it”, and again again

It has been said to gracefully restart explorer.exe instead of crashing it, it still chooses violence for a restart. It asks “do you want to reboot” twice.

I like having the bleeding edge stuff, running nextcloud in docker under the “latest” tag, but those are clearly nightlies

mranderson17,

I think this one github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/5369 is probably the more relevant, and also open, issue. However even in that issue people claim you can choose not to. The argument is only that it suggests restarting explorer and also rebooting and that this is annoying. So you never get a prompt, it just dies?

I agree though that the amount of time where it was force rebooting is pretty bad, and it looks like the rollout of the patch was mishandled. I also should probably admit that I’ve never touched the windows client, my environment is entirely Linux and Android. The Linux client even with file manager integration doesn’t require restarts of anything.

simon574,

Wasn’t OP complaining about the Windows desktop client? What has that to do with the server setup, Docker, etc? People can have the exact same issues on the client side even if the Nextcloud instance is professionally managed by a large organization.

Vendetta9076,
@Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works avatar

Nextcloud… Sucks. I gave up and decided to just run discreet services for my needs. Ends up being far more reliable.

BearOfaTime,

I turn off auto updates for everything - OS, phone apps, everything. Last thing I need is for stuff to hang, reboot, stop working, or work differently with no notice, which has happened too many times to count.

Every update I do is done while I’m there, with validation after to ensure everything works.

harsh3466,

I abandoned nextcloud entirely a couple years ago. It was just too damn flaky (self hosted via docker).

bbuez,

I was genuinely concerened I had a skill issue with NC, glad I’m not alone

rambos,

My skills are not impressive at all, but my NC instance is rock solid. Its been running on rpi4 for more than 6 months and then moved to Celeron server a year ago. I have disabled most plugins since I dont use them and its been quite fast. Only 2 users though. Linux/Windows/Android clients are auto updated, but I manually update the server (docker). Hope Im not gonna jinx it lol

harsh3466,

I’m glad yours is stable! I don’t know why, but mine, if you’d cut a loud fart near the server Nextcloud would just shit the bed on me. God forbid I try to update Nextcloud.

Like you I had most plugins disabled, and I was the only user. I first ran Nextcloud using NextcloudPi on an rpi4, and that ran solid for like four years. However, when I repurposed that pi and moved Nextcloud to my server in Docker, it just would not reliably run for me no matter what I did. At that point I also wasn’t really using Nextcloud anymore so I just abandoned it as not worth the effort.

chrisg,

@harsh3466 @rambos

My experience also.
Ridiculous performance issues plus don't breath on it level of fragility .. no thanks

marcos,

Nobody said “syncthing” on this thread yet, so that will be me.

Moonrise2473,

Finally someone did a windows installer that can add it as a service.

It was super annoying to do it manually on windows, to have it reliably start before login

catloaf,

nssm.cc

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think that their paid enterprise customers are doing the beta alpha testers like this. Is it really necessary to push nightlies to end users? It can’t be tested casually for a couple of days then pushed?

I’m sure their enterprise customers are having the same poor experience you’re having.

And FYI nothing is really tested in NC nor nothing is really 100% done, everything is always at 75% and then gets replaced by another half assed implementation.

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