When Nextcloud first were announced we didn’t really know what to do. Should we stay with ownCloud that had worked so good for the past 3 years, or should we make the switch to Nextcloud? We felt loyalty against ownCloud because they had served us well, but at the same time many developers from the core ownCloud team chose to follow Frank into Nextcloud. Long story short, we were confused. So we decided to give it some months to see how everything evolved.
Now is the time
As we became official VM providers of the Nextcloud VM we also became involved in the community in a natural way. We noticed that while more people chose Nextcloud, the ownCloud community faded away more and more – at least that’s how we felt it. We are still ownCloud members on Github and get email updates on changes regarding the community, but lately we noticed less activity while emails regarding the Nextcloud community never ended. The atmosphere that used to exist in the ownCloud community now exists in Nextcloud community instead. We belive it’s becuase many of the developers that were active in the community chose to join Nextcloud instead. We can’t speak for what’s going in behind closed doors, but that’s how we feel about it.
We posted a poll that got presented to you if you visited any of the Nextcloud / ownCloud VM sites in July and since then, here are the results:
The graphs speaks for itself. Nextcloud is taking the lead – if not already in the lead – by our users.
Should I migrate?
Well, that’s up to you, but looking at the current situation it really feels like now is the time. There will come a time in the future when Nextclouds core code will differ that much from ownClouds core code that it will be harder to migrate just straight off like you’re able to do right now. Well, if Nextcloud doesn’t provide a migration tool as they were talking about doing before. But basically, all the apps and stuff are compatible with Nextcloud at the moment, even experimental apps like ownNote (we tried it). It also feels like there is happening more in the Nextcloud community, one example is the App Store. Wow. Another fact is that some of the most frequently downloaded apps like Calendar has moved to Nextcloud, we think that speaks for itself. What will happen in the future? Will developers choose Nextcloud when they develop apps, or will they choose ownCloud? Considering the current situation and what’s going on we think it’s likely that Nextcloud will be the natural choice for developers. When Nextcloud 11 is released there will be even more improvements to the actual GUI. So, it’s your choice, and we don’t want to recommend anything as we still support ownCloud, but look at the facts and make your decision.
How do i migrate?
Nextcloud offers a migration tool that takes care of everything for you, but if you like you can do it manually as well of course. It all melts down to doing a backup of your config and data folder and replace ownCloud with the Nextcloud files. Here is how you do it by your own, but if you want professional help just check this out.
We migrated
As the headline says, we migrated to Nextcloud today, mostly because of the above reasons and that we felt that the time was right. Nextcloud has matured very much in just a few months.
There are bugs in the ownCloud tracker that are several years old, and suggestions of enhancements that never happen, it just feels like it kind of died when Nextcloud arrived. No hard feelings here guys. Also, the Nextcloud App Store, the design of the GUI, small tweaks and fixes all combined together just made it a done deal for us. Now we’re awaiting Nextcloud 11 with a lot of new stuff. We’re already exited!
Just for the record: We will still provide the ownCloud VMs and maintain them, we will also still be active in the ownCloud community to some point.
Thanks for reading this far.
