This also doesn't reflect my experience. I have very minimal issues with the Nextcloud instance that I have been running on a small fanless computer at home for several years now.

It has even passed the non-technical spouse test, which is important!

It is used for files storage/sharing, backups, photo backups, recipes, calendar (caldav), contact (carddav), todo lists, bookmarks, webmail (rainloop to an externally hosted imap provider), and other stuff, all from Linux, Mac OSX (spouse) and iphones.

My biggest complaint is that there isn't an LTS version, and since you can't skip versions when upgrading, I feel like I need to make sure I update every 3-4 months, even though it isn't publicly available on the Internet (it is on my local network which is always available on all devices thanks to wireguard)

I hope it will stay this way for you. Still, the project has a ton of open issues and bugs, which haven't been addressed in months or years. You will encounter them sooner or later, if you use it for longer periods of time.

This does not reflect my experience at all. If you're using Unraid, there are common packages for it; and, if you're like me and don't trust those, you can run the NextCloud All In One Docker container to get it set up.

You can also run the NextCloud All-In-One Docker container just on a regular linux box and it'll work, as well. It is a central manager for a collection of docker containers that it starts up. Works great. I definitely encourage NextCloud.

Nextcloud is really just awful to manage. It is kinda insane that you have to do all major version migrations consecutively _manually_, so if you are on 10 and didn't upgrade for a while and current is 13, you have to do 10->11, 11->12 and finally 12->13.

That's the one thing that makes sense.

How so?

How is your experience with the OwnCloud rewrite? Have you had any hickups? Generally faster too?

It only does a fraction of what Nextcloud does: Files and (optionally) Cloud Office (via Collabora). These two functions work very well. Reliable, fast and at a fraction of the ressource usage compared to Nextcloud. I hope OCIS will open up to Plugins/Apps like Nextcloud, so we can get Groupware and other Apps on it as well.

There's a public demo deployment available here: https://ocis.owncloud.com/

How is SeaFile these days? I really want something close to Dropbox, but my own drives.

Syncthing is a flawless Dropbox replacement in my experience. There's a big caveat that you need something like a NAS or your home server always online with it though as it's peer to peer sync only.

Syncthing doesn't support my older Mac devices anymore. I can't get Syncthing to work on Mac OSX Yosemite (10.10.5). And no, the device is not upgradable for a variety of reasons not worth going into.

Any solutions there?

Depends on your use case. Maybe simple rsync and cron would be viable.

If you edit a file on two devices at the same time, doesn’t Dropbox just create a copy of the file? Is that process what you’re referring to?

Sometimes Dropbox does, but mostly it seems to figure it out.

Sync thing on the other hand creates a conflict almost always.

I’ve never used syncthing, when you say it “creates a conflict”, does that mean the same file copy mechanism as Dropbox?

There are various strategies you can choose. If you mean creating a copy of the file with the conflict then yup.

This is something that nextcloud does really well. There are lots of sync tools on the level of syncthing, but my experience with nextcloud is a polished experience truly competitve with Dropbox on the complicated stuff like conflict handling, private/restricted shares, etc.