I’ve been using ownCloud for many years, maybe a decade or close to it. Every once in a white, something has happened where I decided to reinstall it. I’ve run it on bare metal an in a VM and it’s worked great for years.
But it has an achille’s heel. It’s a real pain in the ass to install and configure. I run it on a headless ubuntu server edition (now 24.04, I only uee LTS releases). This time, as I was going through the OS installation, the installer presented a list of optional “snaps” that I could install. I usually scoff at snaps. I hate the concept; so much so that I usually remove all traces of snap whenever I do a new OS installation. I’ve even been considering going back to Fedora.
But I saw in that list of snaps the Nextcloud package. It’s a fork of ownCloud and I’ve heard a lot of people sing its praises. I’ve always been happy with ownCloud so I didn’t have a reason to switch. But this time was different. I loathe the process of configuring php, webserver, and database. It’s all easy enough to do but it’s tedious and error-prone.
So I thought, “why the hell not?” I’ll give this Nextcloud snap a try. It’s just a new virtual machine so it’s not like I have anything to lose.
And boy am I glad I did it. All I had to manually configure was the allowed URL list. It really was a “snap”. I haven’t yet looked into enabling SSL (how do you do that with a snap?) but I’ll get it done. I’m just happy watching all my files flow into Nextcloud repo and my contacts and calendar imported without a hitch.
So am I a convert? I am when it comes to ownCloud vs. Nextcloud. ownCloud needs to get off their addiction to php 7.4. BOTH companies can make it easier for people to find the free/community editions as well. But as for snaps, no, they still suck. Not because this snap screwed me over or anything, but I still don’t like the concept and implementation. At least I can still “get under the hood” and configure them, which is probably how I’ll enable SSL. It’s just weird seeing a linux directory tree all embedded in one folder on the base OS.