Nextcloud Disappointment

Back a few months ago, I was truly awed by Nextcloud. It does a lot, has a ton of extensibility, looks nice, and has so much potential to replace so many Google products. I thought, at the time, that I’d be using it constantly for all sorts of things. I thought I’d use it in place of Google Photos, Keep, Google Drive, pCloud, Google Forms, and maybe even Google Docs.

But the reality is that it’s just not as good as it should be, and that makes me sad and disappointed.

To be clear, this is mostly an expectations problem. I expected Nextcloud to be better, and it failed to live up to those expectations. Granted, the hype was pretty intense. People have told me many times how good Nextcloud is at doing many different things. But the problem with doing so much is that you never have a chance to be excellent at anything. KDE knows this. Nextcloud has the same problem. It does too much and just can’t seem to do any of it really well.

For example, image storage and sync. Nextcloud, in theory, should do this very well. And if you do this for a few excellently named images, you’ll be great. If your image library is like mine, with odd names with symbols (because every phone has to have something in there to make the file name stand out), then you’ll have some issues. Not all the time, but the number of times a photo wouldn’t sync because it had a file name that wasn’t compatible with Nextcloud’s rules. And what if your photo library also has videos in it? Woo boy, I hope those aren’t high-quality videos over a certain size. If they are, you’re in trouble.

The thing that Nextcloud should be good at, file storage and synchronization, it’s not. It has trouble with any file over a certain size and spits out errors left and right. Part of this, maybe a big part of it, is that the desktop app is perhaps the worst app ever written. It syncs constantly (even if you tell it not to), it doesn’t like to remember your password (even if you have polkit running and working properly), and it crashes all the time when it stumbles over something it can’t do. But the size thing is just a Nextcloud defaults issue. The upload limit might as well be hardcoded, as changing it is near impossible. Oh, there’s a setting in the configuration file, but changing it (at least for me) did not do a damn thing.

This all led me to changing the way I use Nextcloud. Now all I use it for is simple text and markdown files. And even that is bad. I often end up with duplicates of my notes for no apparent reason. I’ve also seen notes and files move somewhere else in the file tree, usually outside the directory they were originally stored in. Why? Who knows?

I find myself frustrated. I want this to work so badly, but there are just these little things that make Nextcloud not good to use. It’s possible it would all be solved if I were more adept at resolving the issues. Maybe I’m doing everything wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I don’t want to spend my time fixing this thing. I just need it to work for the things it should work for, and right now, it doesn’t do that. It barely works, and even then it seems buggy.

A few months ago, I wrote about how I had found my endgame note-taking solution. That solution relied heavily on Nextcloud syncing my notes back and forth between my computer and my Android device. For the most part this has worked, but it has also led to a ton of duplicate markdown files all over the place, and I’m not sure why. All I know is it happens somewhere in the sync process. It’s made my notes directory almost useless to navigate because it’s filled up with duplicate notes.

I take a ton of notes. I want this to be reliable. But right now, it’s not. So, I’m going to have to stop using Nextcloud for this purpose, just like I stopped using it for photo storage. And that’s just disappointing. It makes me feel like I failed at it, which I did, and that’s not a great feeling.

So what say you? Have you used Nextcloud? What was your experience? Sound off in the comments below.