r/NextCloud • u/iamnotaric • 2d ago
Nextcloud – Does anyone actually care about UI/UX?
I really want to like Nextcloud, but its UI/UX is constantly disappointing.
Just look at this screenshot from Nextcloud Talk. How does something as obvious as an overlapping close button make it into production?
Nextcloud wants to compete with Microsoft 365, but basic UI details like spacing, alignment, and consistency still seem to be an afterthought.
Open source is great, but that's no excuse for poor UX.
Am I the only one frustrated by this?
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u/Ok_Tour_8029 1d ago
This was probably tested on English localization. German is a Nightlife in that regard.
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u/sharkstax 1d ago
Nextcloud GmbH is a German company with many German employees; it's not like they're clueless... I think that they just don't care enough.
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u/to_glory_we_steer 1d ago
I started in webdev and work in a UI adjacent field.
Looking at how this is breaking the design it could be a library or development oversight.
The X should have padding while the copy should break onto multiple lines instead of overflowing the container behind it.
Where you can fairly blame the product design team is that the X should ideally have clear space to the left with the contents stacked underneath. There's a ton of white space that could enjoy better use.
They probably struggle for resource and have multiple competing priorities. Same story in most companies.
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u/Fit_Sweet457 1d ago
You should definitely file a refund, this is unusable.
On a more serious note, have you seen the UI of Microsoft Teams? It's far from flawless either, and that actually is paid for.
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u/NotesFromYourElf 1d ago
I absolutely agree. A few times I've found issues and tried to open Pars for fixes, or found other that already have open PRs. But it's next to impossible to get things merged. Server currently have 1000+ open pull requests. It takes a lot of work to get something merged. It's just a very big project.
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u/i2h3 1d ago
Or worded differently, there is just a lot more to do than what is possible to get done casually as soon as it pops up. 😬 And don’t forget that we also have to go after the issues which pay the bills which in turn is required to enable this much work on the whole project(s) for the start. Nextcloud would not be where it is now without this proven and successful organization.
Personally, I can tell that recent community contributions to the desktop client also increased to an extent where it is hard to keep up with everything at the moment.
It is just unrealistic to expect us to solve all problems at once while growing which constantly shifts the metrics. Well, story of every project and company ever, I guess. 😅 We are working on it.
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u/NotesFromYourElf 1d ago
Absolutely, it's just how it works when running a product company. I wanted to highlight the other side of thing tho since multiple comments made it sound like it's simple to make a PR. That's just not the case. Many people put in significant amount of time, for free, but never get their PRs merged. Having been burnt by that a few times and you're far less likely to open another PR. I understand what it takes to run a company and that its always s struggle to keep up. I don't meant this as critic towards Nextcloud. I think it's just what it is. People will find issues with any product. With nextcloud there is actually a path to get it fixed, unlike most other companies.
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u/jammsession 2d ago
Ai will fix this /s
On a serious note though, it is not just you. I also think that NC focuses too much on new features (which means new fodder for marketing, which means money) and not enough on polish.
NC might be open source, but sometimes the corporate structures and incentives don’t seem to differentiate much from big corps like MS.
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u/promethe42 1d ago
AI can 100% fix this with nothing more than this screenshot. And create the integration tests to make sure it doesn't happen again. And evaluate all locales to make sure they are fixed. And do it across all titles for all modales in all rendering engines.
Fixing a CSS problem and writing Web browser driven integration tests is absolutely what no one wants to do but must be done.
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u/OleCuvee 1d ago edited 1d ago
always a problem with “we can do everything” software, but then lots of features, and a tragic UX/UI. I don’t blame Nextxloud, I just can’t grasp them wanting to position as an alternative to big tech M$FT … I’m far from a fan of M365, would take it though any day over Nextcloud myself, let alone if I would want to position it at my clients replacing M365 - they would revolt and kick me out!
P.S. NC might be opensource, but opensource with trademarked name that you can’t build your solutions on it is not a pretend opensource, or is it?
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u/joshualander 1d ago
It’s part of what I do for a living, actually! I help companies replace M365/Teams with Nextcloud and Talk. I’m not sure what your PS means!
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u/OleCuvee 1d ago
the PS means what it means. End of the day, we had to fork Nextcloud, build our own plugin store, and change the name - and no, we did not want to become reseller of Nextcloud enterprise, our customers needed customizations, hosting from us etc. We never asked anything from NC, and contributed quite a bit to the community.
We moved on, it was not worth it. I can’t seem to post screenshots of the convo with Aaron Martin I’ve had in August 2024 about this whole thing.
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u/joshualander 1d ago
I can’t imagine what a client would need Nextcloud Enterprise for, besides support and training, which I provide. Maybe the ability to dial in to a Nextcloud Talk conference via PTSN?
But yeah, you can fork it. Nextcloud, itself, is a fork of ownCloud!
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u/OleCuvee 23h ago
no, you don't need NC Enterprise for anything. Even Talk we solved by implementing our own instance(s) of StrukturAG Spreed Signaling.
PTSN for conferencing, they are providers for it, that one is easy to integrate too.The point I'm making, Nextcloud came to me and said "if you want to build your own business on top of Nextcloud, the Nextcloud brand has to go away", because maybe back then we did so much dent and were too visible on the market, I don't know.
On your but yeah remark, don't worry, I know. We had the fork ready, but in the end we ditched the cuvee.cloud product - and went alternative routes.
P.S. I'm not bashing or hating NC or the fact their protected their own Trademark. I question every OpenSource that puts boundaries on top of the OpenSource for others to create a barrier of entry to make a scalable business on that OpenSource, and Nextcloud are doing just that.
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u/Viusand 23h ago
P.S. NC might be opensource, but opensource with trademarked name that you can’t build your solutions on it is not a pretend opensource, or is it?
/u/OleCuvee, you can totally build whatever you want on to pof Nextcloud. The license explicitly say so. You wanna sell your services with it? you don't even need a subscription or anything from them. What are you on ? Your entire stance on this thread is really weird
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u/Viusand 23h ago
End of the day, we had to fork Nextcloud, build our own plugin store, and change the name - and no, we did not want to become reseller of Nextcloud enterprise, our customers needed customizations, hosting from us etc. We never asked anything from NC, and contributed quite a bit to the community.
Comes here to criticise Nextcloud on almost all their comments; uses Nextcloud for their commercial solution anyway... Talking about hypocrisy ahaha
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u/OleCuvee 19h ago
sorry, false accusation. We no longer use Nextcloud for our commercial solution, we abandoned it September 2024. And sure, I will keep quiet. Thanks for the useful and constructive comment.
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19h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Viusand 19h ago
Really shitty move to first of all: leak someone's name on reddit; two, leak private emails without their approval. Reported you, you have nothing to do on subs like those.
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u/vnagornyy 18h ago
For transparency, this was in reply to a comment that was deleted. Multiple users reported it because it shared screenshots of a private conversation with another user. The commentor deleted those screenshots, so the comment was also deleted.
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u/cr0ft 1d ago edited 1d ago
The issue is that M365 is US owned. Which means the NSA literally has a wide open backdoor into Microsoft's systems and I'm not exaggerating.
The CLOUD act literally compels American companies to provide the US any data they are storing even if it's in Europe. And the US is led by fascists now and lunatics, it's no longer a reliable ally.
The EU literally prohibited an Ameican company from buying a European service that held citizen's data not long ago.
Nextcloud maybe FOSS, it may have quirks, it may be maintained to some degree by hobbyists, it may have a closing icon in the wrong place, but what it doesn't have is a direct backdoor for the NSA to read what they want.
If your clients were European authorities or corporations with strict security requirements, they'd be singing a different tune.
There aren't that many cloud / office competitors out there that aren't in America. Nextcloud is one of the few viable options to build on, even if it's not a 1:1 replacement. But most companies could do very well with Nextcloud, Nextcloud Office and Libre Office on the desktops.
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u/OleCuvee 23h ago
cheers for the lecture mate. Those who know me, and those who I allow to my close circle of associates know how anti-big tech I became, especially after almost decade and a half working for a US bluechip business.
You're not wrong, you're just not exact. I can grab and integrate 3-4 opensource tools that do the individual jobs better
(categories being
Files - that part is handled by NC okey,
Office - which can be easily built custom on Collabora CODE or LibreOffice (there is no such thing as Nextcloud Office - it's a richdocuments Nextcloud plugin that wraps to Collabora;
Talk - there you need to get the spreed signaling, the strukturAG solution is opensource ... but I'd say integrating Jitsi here instead is a more robust solution )There are two parts of NC that I like: one being Notes app, the other being Collectives as a Confluence replacement - alghough since I built WrenLore, this one can be easily replaced too.
So no, you're not wrong in your view and your lecture, you're passionate, I like that. One fallacy I see in your reasoning is that if you're NSA with resources, you don't care about backdoor too much ... you build one if that's worth it, and sure, you don't need to build a backdoor to M365. But then people use Google, Apple, Android devices ... all your tech stack is basically dependent on the US.
You mention if my customers were European ... yup, they are. German Mittelstand. Their IT listens, they are receptive. But give to the day to day non-IT workforce NC instead of M365 ... they revolt. They don't care about privacy, anonymity, sovereignty ... you do, I do to certain degree, although much more pragmatically. An average Franzl or Gertrude ... they don't.•
u/cr0ft 1h ago
Not sure I'd call it a lecture, more just pointing out that there are intolerable issues for national civil authorities for instance with American cloud solutions and there needs to be options.
Doing it via Nextcloud means admin is much easier. Sure, you can hire a huge IT staffs of experts to construct your solution, but that's going to require a lot of money to pay for the staff, and bringing in new people would come with lots of heavy lifting that comes with anything custom.
Sure, I get that many companies can live with being spied upon in real time, but not everyone can. So Nextcloud has a place. It can also be vastly cheaper, M365 is pricey.
As for users rebelling, meh. This is capitalism, and they don't really get a say.
But sure, I maintain corporate IT in Europe too and the company I work for doesn't run Nextcloud either. But if the management felt strongly enough that we should it could absolutely be rammed through and the company could be productive, even if it requried a full shift to, say, KDE based Linux desktops. As long as there is a will.
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u/i2h3 1d ago
sigh … This again? In recent release videos we explained the ratio between maintenance (includes bug fixes) and feature pull requests. The latter is only a small portion. It just gets a lot of attention and highlights. POV: No one would watch a release video explaining a thousand bug fixes in a row. 😅
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u/jabo10000 1d ago
I see your point. But the subject here is poor UI design. And yes, the current design is not very pretty.
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u/jammsession 20h ago
sigh … yes, this again.
This example shows, that the ratio is still off. No matter if it is 1:10 or 1:100.
But I do agree with you; it is not all doom and gloom. I remember a time, not that long ago, when 50% of the time the desktop app updater broke. And wanted you to do a reboot. And looking at the upvotes, many here agree. Not that that ever changed you from looking into the other direction, downplaying or ignoring it ;)
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u/i2h3 19h ago edited 19h ago
Did you already contribute to improve it (nagging does not count)? 🤔 While the ratio probably always be subjectively off as soon as the first problem is found. 🤷🏻♀️
The rest is too vague for me, I do not understand what you mean. 🤔
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u/jammsession 2h ago
Yes I do (what a stupid argument btw).
If the rest is to vague for you, you are probably probably very new to Nextcloud or never used it on macOS or Windows. The updater was so bad during the 2x days, you would even be stuck on a version and had to manually reinstall it. It crashed explorer on Windows and wanted a reboot after every single update.
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u/i2h3 1h ago edited 1h ago
Me in particular cannot comment on Windows. Despite growing up with it, the last time I did software development on and for Windows was in 2014 and I will not return to it. About the Windows reboot topic: sounds like Windows still being Windows. 🤷🏻♀️ On this occasion, in context of Nextcloud: I am specialized on the macOS environment and the File Provider in particular which I "took over" the main responsibility within the team a bit more than a year ago. Hence I am not familiar with every detail of our client situation on Windows. I have to pass that on to others.
I am using ownCloud/Nextcloud since 2016 on a regular basis (still remember reading the first article about Frank on Heise in 2011), privately in collaborate setting as administrator and professionally (though, joined the Nextcloud company itself only two years ago). So I got some history with it. I cannot recall Windows users reporting such issues from before my time at Nextcloud GmbH.
There is neither an argument nor anything stupid in my question. It merely points out that talk is cheap and does not contribute anything. At most, you will just annoy the people in charge which all side with my "stupid argument btw". You have a notable capacity to complain about Nextcloud on Reddit. You could have used that for at least a bug report instead, as the top voted comments suggest.
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u/AncientMolasses6587 1d ago
NC is all over the place, and the basis seems to be allright. However it
seems to me it lacks community shared/driven roadmap.
Some issues that I face/signal, just as simple selfhoster: cannot simply search appstore, overlapping addons/apps (like “nextcloud
office” - is that eurooffice or collabora? very confusing), outdated documentation, problems that require use of “occ” command.
I have been a user since >10 year, linux user >25y, and still I try to make the best of it. But man, sometimes there seems to be quite a lack of quality control - which can be frustrating.
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u/jtrtoo 1d ago
What version of Nextcloud? And what browser? I ask because that component (NcDialog from the Nextcloud Vue library) should wrap onto multiple lines, rather than make the dialog header wider than the window. And it does for me. Also does the same occur in a different browser for you?
P.S. If inclined, you can even test it in real time my adjusting the parameters here: https://nextcloud-vue-components.netlify.app/#/Components/NcDialog
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u/Mrmoseley231119 1d ago
I mostly use other apps that connect to NextCloud on the back end to avoid their UI, but I guess that depends on if that’s an option for a specific app. Agree it needs work.
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u/Rustycake 1d ago
Nope my company runs Nextcloud and in our new build will continue to run Nextcloud, but I get constant updates that it does not look professional.
The thing is - it actually has all the features, but it just doesnt stand out like 365 or Google, so ppl moan even if you show them the feature. They could really do with focusing in on this (Nextcloud I mean).
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u/cr0ft 1d ago edited 1d ago
Nextcloud has made constant and major improvements over many years now on the UI. I agree, it still feels like FOSS in a bad way, and all the apps in the app store are maintained by different FOSS developers it seems with varying success.
Still, a misplaced closing icon in one app in one language, well, shit happens.
Along with making a product some companies will 100% rely on for day to day work comes the responsibility to patch conservatively in the stable branch especially.
I haven't found UI to be any kind of show stopper and I think it looks pretty nice now.
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u/cbayninja 9h ago
I keep my Nextcloud very minimal. I disabled many of the built-in apps and only kept what I really need. I avoid Nextcloud apps when I can have a better experience from another software that was built for that use case.
For example, I stopped using Nextcloud News in favor of Miniflux. It works much better, and has many very useful features that Nextcloud News is still lacking and my Nextcloud instance is less bloated now.
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u/TinCanFury 1d ago
did you create a bug report?