Maintenance release for visual issue in Hub 6

Minor release to fix the file picker dialog

September 21st we published minor releases for Hub 3 and 4, and decided to also push out the first fixes for the freshly released Hub 6. Perhaps we were a little too eager to bring you these fixes, as a new problem slipped in: the style sheets for the new file picker were not properly compiled. In short, it didn’t look very good at all, though it was functional. Our standards exceed “barely functional”, so we decided to bring you another minor update.

A few other fixes also made it in giving this release about 20 small improvements, from the mentioned fix for the file selection dialog to a fix that ensures user quota are counted in binary, not base 10 (we don’t sell disk drives after all). A small feature also made it in, let’s quote from the pull request by R0Wi:

Let occ trashbin:restore restore also from groupfolders and add additional filters.

• Using the TrashManager allows access to all deleted files
• Add ‘scope’ parameter to choose where to restore from (user or groupfolders)
• Add ‘restore-from’ and ‘restore-to’ date parameters to filter files to be
  restored by their deletion date
• Add ‘dry-run’ flag to be able to see which files would be restored and being
  able to adjust the filter parameters accordingly

This can be incredibly helpful if a user accidentally deleted a ton of files on a certain day – for example, because they were trying to clean up space on their disk drive in a folder synced with the server, not realizing their colleagues would now also have more free disk space. These things happen!

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website.

After this, we intend to go back to our regular schedule, with the next minor releases coming in 2 weeks, on October 19. Note that Hub 3 (25.x) will then get its final update, meaning no more security fixes. We strongly recommend you update to Hub 4 or newer, or move to Nextcloud Enterprise for up to 5 years of updates.

If you are on Hub 5 (27.0.x) you will get 27.1.x offered by updater, in other words – you will move to Hub 6. As the core version number indicates, the changes were limited to apps, meaning your update should be quick and smooth, and Hub 5 is effectively superseded by Hub 6.

Desktop client 3.10

As a reminder, the Desktop Client team made 3.10 available together with the release of Nextcloud Hub 6. This is a major release with a ton improvements. The biggest is that, in addition to locking files that are being edited on the server, the client can now also detect files being opened locally in Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, and lock the files on the server (and other clients). This can help avoid conflicts between multiple users editing the same file.

Here is a list of other, smaller improvements:

• Files that are deleted on the server can now optionally go to the trash on the client. This was available for Linux but now also on Windows and MacOS.
• There is now a warning when a new folder goes over the folder size limit, so you can choose to stop syncing it.
• Sync issues are now always on top of the activity list, so conflicts for example can be resolved even easier.
• Share dialog now has ‘allow resharing’ option and suggests a password when passwords are set as mandatory on the server
• File locking works better with virtual files
• Improved migration from ownCloud to Nextcloud

A lot of other improvements to network and conflict handling, dealing with notifications, end-to-end encryption and bulk upload have been made as well. Support for uploading multi-part chunks to S3 will make the use of object storage much faster, especially with large files, but only when S3 is used as primary storage.

You can find the full changelog here.

Note: There will be no more releases of Nextcloud Hub 2 (24.x.x and older). Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 3 or Hub 4. Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed.

Note²: PHP 7.x is no longer officially supported by the PHP community. Nextcloud has supported PHP 8.0 and newer versions for some time now, and we strongly recommend you move to a newer version of PHP. Version 8.0 is already out of active support (!) and has only a few weeks of security updates left. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) deprecates PHP 7.4 but still works with it. Still we recommend you use PHP 8.1 or newer. Hub 4 and newer support PHP 8.2.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 6?

Nextcloud Hub 6 was released 2 weeks ago and we recommend that you check it out to see if you can benefit from its latest features. A quick summary:

💡 100% local, private AI assistant that can summarize your mail threads and help you write, translate, dictate and more
🗣️ Show speaking time, 1 hour call warning for a healthy meeting culture
🔔 File, chat & mail reminders so you don’t always have to JUMP immediately on what’s new
🤖 Bots in Talk to help you summarize meetings and bring content from other tools in Talk
🗃️ New file selector to make navigating your files easier, and updated share flow to simplify sharing
✨ NEW: developers can now write apps in ANY language, not just PHP!
➕ Much, much more!

Check out the full release announcement here.

Note that the AI features are, of course, optional – and updating is easy as Hub 6 is built on the same foundation as Hub 5, not requiring any heavy migrations.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.