Probably irrelevant but I gave up on next cloud because I found the syncing apps to be unusable on Mac, windows and Linux. Nothing ever worked the way it was meant to. They crashed all the time, were unresponsive, and the UX was terrible
This article is thick with tribalism, but I personally found it to be a mixed bag. For open source software and self-hosting enthusiasts, NextCloud (OwnCloud, et al) makes you feel really empowered to sort of build out your own personal cloud and/or groupware, and in many of the most salient aspects it delivers.
But like anything so ambitious in scope, it doesn’t take much before you begin to push up against its boundaries (even as generous as they are). This is the kind of software that the biggest players in the industry devote armies of highly paid developers and billions of capital to. The accomplishments of the OSS community should not be diminished. I personally will continue to use and support these tools in my own capacity. But it’s kind of inevitable that, while they offer lots of cool major features, they won’t ever be quite as polished or refined as competing solutions from industry giants, or even other OSS apps that take a narrower, more uni-tasked approach.
Having read through most of these comments, I think the truth is probably somewhere between competing ideas, and everything else is subjective and context-dependent.
Coming from Dropbox, OneDrive etc I guess I assumed it would "just work". And if I'm honest my experience was compounded by other issues. I was running my server on a pi4 and didn't initially give it a fixed IP so the clients lost it, but even after I sorted those issues and had a solid server, the tray apps just would not sync. Sometimes even stopping and restarting the app wouldn't help. All I really wanted was to have a shared sync folder like Dropbox, across OS with storage size only limited by what I could configure in my attic, but I gave up after a week of trying to fix it night after night.
I hate the nextcloud ux with a passion and I'm running multiple instances for company and non-profits. Especially their calendar app makes we want to delete that thing every time I have to use it.
If you leave the beaten path it tends to break.
It's free and it feels wrong to complain but it's not good software IMHO.
