full image - Repost: My slow progression towards and away from NextCloud (from Reddit.com, My slow progression towards and away from NextCloud)
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The goodI really like NextCloud. When I decided to use my NAS for actual self-hosting, NC was the first service I spun up, back then as snap image because I had no idea how containers worked and it was the easiest way. Once I graduted to docker, NC was among the first services I spun up, again. I'm using the stable branch and it has been rock-solid so far. NC apps made it extremely easy to try new things and I discovered many useful services to self-host which I would never even have attempted otherwise. Thanks to NC, I did use at some point, at least temporarily:NC Files, the obvious cloud funcationality, primarily to upload and store photos from my phone, but also to have a couple of documents available on multiple computersNC Photos, to view said photosNC Mail, NC Calender, and NC Contacts, as groupware solutionNC News was my first RSS aggregator, back when I was doubing whether I might need something like this at all - now I can't imagine not having oneNC Deck (and, very shortly, NC Tasks) to organise my tasks / todosNC Notes to keep track of notes and all kinds of informationNC Bookmarks to store long-term bookmarks which I don't want to clutter my browser bookmark barNC Office, to be able to have a nice web interface to view those few documents I store within NCNC draw.io integration to store and directly edit my homelab network diagramThe badEven though I like NC overall, the web UI does feel slugging. The apps are super easy to install and try, but often they do lack some depth or advanced functionality and customisation options are limited. Which is why I actually have slowly beeing replacing them with dedicated self-hosted alternatives. Not because of some fundamental issue with NC as such, it has been rock-solid and reliable for me, mainly because I either want a more responsive web UI or additonal functionality for a specific app.The journeyMost NC apps I used to use have been replaced by now:NC Notes was simply too simple. I tried Trilium Notes, which is awesome, but ultimately landed on BookStack for my wiki/documentation/notes. For notes alone it's a bit too much, but it handles them well enough and for long term documentation it's just perfect.NC draw.io became redundant once I switched to BookStack. BookStack offers a draw.io integration as well and I'm using it to document my homelab anyway. So I simply store the diagrams in BookStack now. If it weren't for the draw.io integration, I might even think about going back to Trilium Notes.NC Office just didn't work right for me. I used the built-in collabora server and after installing it it'd work fine, but eventually it'd just stop working. Instead of going through the hassle of trying to figure out why, I just use LibreOffice and edit the file in the NC directory locally. The web interface was always just a "nice to have" for me anyway.NC News did have some issues at some point, feeds just wouldn't refresh. And for a rss aggregator, the slugging UI was particularly annoying. I quickly found FreshRSS, which does the same thing but is way faster / more responsive, and it has a nicer UI and some more useful options for customisation as well. Due to FreshRSS (which I would have never tried without NC News) I was able to break my "click 10 news links every half hour" procrastination habit!NC Bookmarks was really great once I set up the auto-screenshot for each bookmark. But ultimately, the sluggish UI and folder navigation was a bit annoying. I gave linkding a try and really liked the snappy, responsive UI and the very quick/efficient tag based filtering. I do miss the gallery view with website screenshots that NC Bookmarks offer, but having a lean and snappy UI is more important I think. Generally it's a bit of an afterthough, though, I don't use my long term bookmark storage frequently anyway.NC Deck was really awesome and convinced me that a Kanban board is actually the best task list I could possibly have. Before, I had a simple task/todo text file in my NC Notes and then in BookStack. I tried NC Tasks and found it more annoying than my simple text file. But having tasks presented on a Kanban board somehow did make a difference for me. I started to use it more and more, which made the slugging NC UI rather annoying. Which is why I have now switchted to Vikunja. Vikunja is kind of overkill for me, since I only really want a basic Kanban board, but it's pretty and the UI is great and it can show tasks on a board. It can do what I need it to, even though I'm only using a small fraction of its capabilities.Some apps, on the other hand, are still going strong and I don't see myself replacing them any time soon:NC Mail, Calendar, and Contacts. They are fine, but not great. The slugging UI is annoying, especially for NC mail. Once NC 25 is stable and I can try the NC Mail 2.0 this might improve a bit, but I'd much rather use SOGo. Sadly, there is no good and practical self-hosted container for SOGo and installing mailcow just for it is overkill. Replacing NC mail with Roundcube is an option that I might explore, but separating mail from calendar/contacts might be too annoying. I also used Rainloop for a while, but it was just as slugging as NC mail. And Snappymail never worked for me for some reason. So, for lack of alternatives, I'm stuck with the NC groupware solution, for now.NC Files, mainly used to upload photos directly into my preferred folder structure. None of the common photo apps respect my folder structure and offer convenient "upload and delete on phone" functionality.NC Photos. Well, technically I might replace this with Photoview at some point, or not, because I barely use it anyway. Any simple "dumb" gallery that does nothing other than showing the items in my folder structure is fine for me. Both NC Photos and Photoview are perfectly fine for this, which is why, at least so far, I'm lazy and sticking to NC Photos.The conclusionI don't know whether I'll ever abandon NC completely. If I do find a groupware solution and a photo management software that fits my use case, maybe I will be able to do without NC. But I'm also happy enough with NC for those, so I'm not in a hurry to replace it. And even if I do, I'm quite grateful that it launched my self-hosting journey and that it made trying new services so easy. Without NC, my server would not nearly have as much to offer as it does now.I hope this small tale of my journey with NC might inspire some people here to try new apps. How is your NC journey going and which apps have you tried, enjoyed, decided to stick with or replaced?Go NextCloud!
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