Software update: Nextcloud 15.0.0 beta 2 / desktop 2.5.0

With Nextcloud it is possible to run cloud storage in-house. It came about after a large number of developers left ownCloud and started over. All components, including the enterprise functionality, are offered as open source and the revenue model is similar to what Red Hat does, which is to provide paid support for large customers. Nextcloud also promises a so-called drop-in replacement, which makes it possible to easily switch from ownCloud to Nextcloud. The developers have released the second beta version of Nextcloud 15, as well as version 2.5.0 of the desktop client† The announcements for both releases are as follows:

Keep it up, beta 2 is here!

After hitting feature freeze and testing beta 1, many issues have been resolved and improvements were made. For this beta, we hope to have most apps in the app store ready supporting 15 and of course we continue to value the upgrade process stability greatly, so test it!

what’s new
You can see a list of what we’ve changed in this release and what is still open in github – consider it our changelog for now.

This is a major release so it comes with loads of goodies, but there’s a lot of testing still to be done. We have our automated tests and it has gotten some basic smoke testing but no test scheme can replace the myriad of ways you all use Nextcloud, on NAS devices to big iron servers!

Besides testing, your help is also welcome in polishing. Small UI improvements, fixes to details – and of course bug fixes! If you are new to Nextcloud, you’re more than welcome to get involved – simply join us on github or check out this page on our website. Note that translations are very welcome too! Now is the time to translate and make sure 15 is ready for as big a number of users as possible. We have millions of users and they don’t all read English!

If you are on the beta channel, we will make beta 2 of 15 available in just a minute, stay tuned!

If you’d rather test 14.0.4rc1, you can configure a separate updater server, see this comment on the forums.

Edit: what’s known broken
One thing we found is that the “App updates available” list was not working in 14.0.3 and 15.0.0 beta 1, so you can’t rely on this when deciding for the update. It always says “All fine – all apps compatible” while they are not. Workaround: apply this or update to 14.0.4 before going to 15 beta 2.

Nextcloud desktop client 2.5 is out with End-to-End Encryption, new login flow and much more

The end of the year is gearing up to be a time with many announcements: Monday we released a new version of our Microsoft Outlook integration, yesterday we announced the Nextcloud Enterprise Day coming March next year and today, we’re excited to release the Nextcloud Desktop Client to you all!!! While there will be more news the coming days (including the second beta of Nextcloud 15 tomorrow), today the spotlight is on desktop and laptop users.

what’s new
The new client has received a lot of work in all areas. The user interface was cleaned up, syncing improved, authentication updated to our new login flow, Simple Signup was integrated, End to End encryption is now available and much more.

End-to-end Encryption
With this release, End-to-end Encryption (E2EE) is available in Nextcloud mobile clients on iOS, Android and now also on the Desktop under Windows, Linux and Mac. End-to-end Encryption is designed to protect you from a compromise of the server, ensuring that even if somebody broke in or a sysadmin wants to snoop, your data is safe.

Inevitably, this means that you can’t access or share this data through a browser. A browser executes code coming from the server and schemes to decrypt data in the browser are thus inherently insecure: if you don’t trust the server, you should of course not give your key to code coming FROM the server. Learn more end-to-end encryption and about encryption in Nextcloud in general.

Unlike typical End-to-end Encryption solutions, our solution is designed for a subset of your data. That is, you can select one or more folders which will be encrypted while the rest of your data continues to be available also from the browser and can easily be shared, edited online and so on. As files are synced one by one and the protocol requires careful locking on the server, E2E causes significant overhead and is not yet suitable for large numbers of files.

Meanwhile, your feedback continues to be very welcome! We will further improve and harden our E2EE in the coming releases.

User experience
We worked hard to make using the client a nicer, more seamless experience. Server-side activities are better integrated, separated per user account and notifications can more easily be opened and acted upon. This can help, for example, with a feature like two-factor authentication using notifications.

We integrated our new login flow which makes it easier to set up your account and handle single sign-on and two-factor authentication. You can now also easily control access of your desktop client to your data from the browser, if you need to do so.

A few more enhancements:

• Available with this release is seamless integration of synced folders into the GNOME file manager sidebar with libcloudproviders.
• The share dialogs have been revisited to bring them more in line with our web and mobile user interfaces.
• Users will notice they can immediately open any of the Nextcloud apps from the context menu in the system tray.
• The notifications have been cleaned up, bothering you no longer with all file changes but just showing important server messages and sync issues.
• Various improvements to platform integrations.

Simple Sign Up
If you are new to Nextcloud and don’t yet have a server, you will now be able to register an account with one of our trusted providers directly from the desktop client! We expect the graph below to start adding red bars on top soon… See our earlier blog on how Simple Sign-up is doing and if you are new to our initiative to deliver decentralized, private clouds to users in an easy package, read our announcement from the Nextcloud Conference!

Sync improvements
There has been a lot of work to make syncing faster and more reliable, and give users more control. You can now edit the list of ignored files, and your free space quota is shown in the configuration screen of the client. Conflict handling was improved, adding the user name to the conflict file name.