Nextcloud 14 beta 3 is here: time for testing and a chance to win a t-shirt!

We are working hard on stabilizing Nextcloud 14 for a release and it is time to get involved! Our third beta has appeared on our servers and you can use our famously easy updater to get it on your server and give it a try, or grab it from our download server.

While we are aware of a few minor issues, our testing is not finding any serious problems anymore: our tests have run, our internal Nextcloud instance is updated, so are many of our private Nextcloud instances. As always, we are particularly looking for regressions and upgrade issues: things that used to work but no longer do, or stuff that breaks the upgrade process. We need help, and we got an incentive for you: If you’re the first to report a problem with the upgrade process, you earn a genuine Nextcloud t-shirt!

What is coming with 14?

A lot, as always, in the areas of security, performance and of course user interface improvements. Stay tuned, we’ll be blogging soon about some of the new features!

Upgrading and t-shirts

To ensure the most reliable upgrade experience for our users, we’d like to bring our testing to a new level. Your help is invaluable in this! No amount of testing matrixes can duplicate the varied circumstances our users deploy Nextcloud in.

As upgrading is the most critical operation with a new release, we’re offering anyone who finds a bug in the upgrade process from Nextcloud 13 to Nextcloud 14 a t-shirt! However, obviously any bug report is welcome, not only those about upgrading.

Besides downloading the zip file and doing a manual upgrade, an alternative is choosing the ‘beta’ channel in the admin panel. We’ve now made Nextcloud 14 Beta 3 available there. If you are on 13.0.x, you can upgrade to 14.0.0 beta3 and if you’re on beta 1 or 2 it’ll also be available as an upgrade!

And remember: if you’re brave enough to upgrade a production system, be sure to at least make a database backup!

Rules

A few simple rules for winning a t-shirt: it has to be a unreported, non-duplicate bug in the upgrade process; that is, something which goes wrong with the upgrade, not in normal usage. Also, we’ll generally consider bugs due to the same root cause duplicates.

smallprint: we reserve the right to decide who gets a t-shirt, no debates possible and if we decide to reward you with a hug instead of a new shirt you should be super happy with that as human contact is very healthy! Perhaps you can collect such a hug at the upcoming Nextcloud Conference in Berlin?

Thanks!!!

This release was developed by the wonderful Nextcloud community and we’d like to thank every single person involved for their help in making this happen! If you’d like to be part of the team that makes the best, most awesome private cloud technology in the world, join us!

You can discuss the release of Beta 3 also on our forums, a good place to begin if you have any questions or found something odd: help.nextcloud.com/t/nextcloud-14-0-0-beta-3-ready-for-testing/