Nextcloud 13 Beta 3 ready for your testing! Go and win a t-shirt!

We’re making swift progress stabilizing Nextcloud 13 and today we’d like to announce the availability of Nextcloud 13 Beta 3 on our download servers! You can use our famously easy updater to get this beta on your server and give it a whirl, or grab it from our download server.

It is becoming harder for our own testing to find problems: our tests have run, our internal Nextcloud instance is updated, so are many of our private Nextcloud instances. We’re 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 13

This release debuts many improvements. We talked about incredible performance improvements like 85% faster LDAP when we released the first beta and you can find more details in that article.

Of course the End-to-end Encryption capability is another testament to our focus: providing you the most secure and most reliable self-hosted file sync and share solution on the market!

Of course, the world is changing and so do the needs of users. Just syncing and sharing files is not enough, something shown by the massive interest in Online Document Editing, secure audio/video calls and other Nextcloud capabilities. This release brings many other improvements in other areas and we ask you to test those, too.

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 12 to Nextcloud 13 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 13 Beta 3 available there. If you are on 12.0.x, you can upgrade to 13.0.0 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 FOSDEM conference in Belgium?

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!