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.
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.
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.
I mentioned the client in there (4th paragraph), but mine was more of a general rant on the overall low effort that seems to have been put in to figuring out what the actual problem was. And that it is relatively common among people in the self hosting community to assume that Nextcloud is a lot simpler than it is. It’s a huge cloud suite consisting of many applications, clients, plugins, proxies, caching, database, etc. You need to have a pretty good understanding of how it all works, and how to investigate a problem, and ideally you should be testing before upgrades. Large organizations often even test endpoint applications like the desktop client and push out only tested versions to users via policy or some kind of endpoint management.
I can’t really draw many conclusions from the very little information provided in this post, but I suspect OPs windows machine is not in an entirely stable state, which is what is causing some of these update issues.
And, I put some of the blame for Nextcloud under-representing it’s complexity on Nextcloud’s marketing and AIO. You absolutely can install it without understanding anything, and that’s a little dangerous in my opinion because it is actually quite complex and you will probably end up breaking it at some point and need to dig in to fix it.
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 https://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
I think this one https://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.
Nobody said “syncthing” on this thread yet, so that will be me.
Which I’m not sure I get the popular mentioning of since it seems to serve a very different purpose than NextCloud does, like not even similar niches.
Nothing against it, of course, it just doesn’t feel like an ‘alternative’ to NC.
It’s popular because differently from NC, Syncthing works.
NextCloud main use is file synchronization. If you take this away, you will almost certainly decide to use some different software for the other features, because NC does them badly.
NextCloud main use is file synchronization
Is it? Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever even considered using it for that purpose.
I mostly use it as an easily web-accessible interface for a variety of unified productivity and organization software (file upload/download, office suite, notes, calendar, etc), with easy ability to do stuff like create a password-protected shared folders of pictures/documents I can easily share with friends and family who don’t have accounts so they can upload/download/organize/edit files with me and each other from a browser without having to install additional software on client devices.
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
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.
Ooo, is it made by the people I work for? Because this story sounds incredibly familiar to me.
😂 I’m sure I’m not your boss cause you’re using a Canadian instance and I’m nowhere near Canada. Maybe it’s just that NC underdelivers equally poorly for almost everyone…
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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.
Nextcloud… Sucks. I gave up and decided to just run discreet services for my needs. Ends up being far more reliable.
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.
Running nextcloud (non docker version) and I don’t see near so many client updates - usually once every few weeks, which would be a reasonable expected pace. Server updates are less frequent.
On Windows (all of my primary devices), I just install the NC client update and skip the explorer restart, pending full reboot later. Tis the nature of literally anything that deeply integrates with Explorer. I’ve seen explorer “death” during updates from several vendors that have similar explorer plugins, not just NC. Explorer sometimes just decides to nope out even without NC updating.
Now on one device I hadn’t opened for a while, I saw NC run two updates in a row, but that was my fault for procrastinating the first one.
Here’s the desktop release history: https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/releases
I don’t see a “one every day” within the block of time between Dec 6 and today, unless you had the release candidate builds which may have been more frequent in a few spots.Update:
Today just to show the bug to someone else, I installed the update via Winget on a windows 10 PC and… nothing. It installed silently, didn’t bother with asking a reboot nor crashed explorer.exe. So I went to another windows 11 PC and tried again with the silent updater and… silently updated without badly crashing explorer.
Either nextcloud fixed the installer for real or Microsoft fixed the reason explorer was crashing in the windows update that was pushed yesterday
Finally the days where all the explorer windows will disappear when updating NC desktop are gone?
I abandoned nextcloud entirely a couple years ago. It was just too damn flaky (self hosted via docker).
I was genuinely concerened I had a skill issue with NC, glad I’m not alone
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
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.
My experience also.
Ridiculous performance issues plus don’t breath on it level of fragility … no thanks
It’s definitely a YMMV situation. I’ve heard from lots of people that it runs solid as a rock in Docker, and from others like you and me where it’s flaky af.
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.
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)
Yeah, i left winget out on purpose, becaus MS literally stole it from appget and still managed to make it bad.
What is the parameter to use that tells apps to not auto update once they are installed?
Not update them? I think those tools are preconfigured to not autoupdate, no?
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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.
