I’ve tried NextCloud before and didn’t really love it and I’m now happy with a combination of syncthing and LibreOffice. But my wife wants the full google drive, with sheets, docs etc. without the google, and I think NextCloud is my best option for that.
I’m and experienced *nix admin and already have a Linux server running with both VMs and docker containers and also have a working OpenVPN setup for remote access. But I found the NextCloud setup frustrating. We had a discussion about it (here I think) and determined that this was because NextCloud would rather sell their hosted service, so they don’t go out of their way to make the self hosted option easy. I get that and don’t hold it against them at all.
But, now that I’m wanting to try it again, I’m looking for pointers to guides for setting up self hosted NextCloud. I’ve searched, but nothing I found seemed like “the one”.
I found Nextcloud all in one pretty easy to install, and it’s been very stable and simple to keep running. Been up for about a year now.
It’s the nextcloud ux that I find kinda frustrating for a family use case. It’s got a hundred features you don’t want, and the ones you want don’t work as well as you’d expect them to. For example, calendar cannot subscribe to external calendars, which is oddly limiting. I don’t uses photos, I don’t use talk, and I don’t use it for mail, presence, messaging, or or most of the other stuff bundled into it. I use files, Collabora office, and notes. And while collabora is reasonably functional on desktop, it’s pretty bad on mobile. if she’s used to gdocs, and expects something similar, she’s probably not gonna like it.
Most of the mobile “office” use will be to view stuff that’s maintained on desktop. I hope it can handle that?
Yeah. Not as polished or functional, but it can do that.
If she’s supportive of the change for the right reasons, it’ll probabky be fine. If she’s being dragged into this against her will, expect some resistance. :-)
I’ve gotten the calendar to subscribe to external calendars. One work related Microsoft calendar, and one for holidays.
Sorry, I didn’t describe my issue properly… Nextcloud can indeed subscribe to external calendars, but read only. This requires you to use a different app/interface to modify or update events on the external calendar, and if you need two calendar apps, it’s not a particularly useful solution IMO. There are other calendars without this limitation (in fact I think every other calendar I’ve used recently). It’s possible that I’m wrong, but it does say right in the Nextcloud interface that it’s read only. If there’s a way around this limitation, I’d live to hear it.
Yeah its read only, but I don’t have to edit the calendars I’m subscribed to, so it works for me.
But it would be mildly annoying if I had to edit stuff in those. I’m not sure how that would work in the first place. In my case Microsoft would have to have some sort of API, even if its just CALDav, so Nextcloud could submit the changes you make. Does Microsoft even allow for something like that?
it’s useful if you share a calendar with a friend/family member/business partner that’s in a different ecosystem like Google, apple, CalDav, etc… It has worked seamlessly for me, which is why the limitation surprised me.