I decided that I will update the nextcloud (windows) desktop client once or twice a decade
I've enough.
Last year the automatic updater was rebooting windows without any warning after the uac prompt. The problem continued for months before being fixed
This year I got an update a week. Very annoying to get the same "why u no reboot? I need updates" question every single time I turn on my PC.
Today when updating it kills explorer.exe without any confirmation and doesn't bring it back to life.
I don't think that their paid enterprise customers are doing the beta alpha testers like this. Is it really necessary to push nightlies to end users? It can't be tested casually for a couple of days then pushed?
I disabled the updates check and will update the nextcloud desktop client manually every 5 years if I can remember. Added an exception to Winget so it doesn't update it. I lost my patience.
Ok, I'm prepared to be downvoted today so here goes.
Nextcloud is an enterprise cloud suite. The one you run in docker on your rpi (or whatever) is the same one that is run at a company, albeit with more high availability and redundancy, but the same application, proxies, caching, db, etc. Nothing is stopping you from running the stable channel and testing your upgrades, or even rolling out specific stable client versions to your devices.
Said companies often have teams (more than one person) to run it, stage upgrades, automated testing, automated backups, monitoring, etc. They go to work and do just that, maybe not every day but at least a couple times a week their focus is Nextcloud and only Nextcloud.
What many people in the self hosting community do is spin up docker, without ever having touched docker before, and try to run Nextcloud, forget that it exists, and then upgrade it a year later across multiple versions without maintaining the database. Then they obsess about how fast an app loads by refreshing it a whole bunch, and then complain on internet forums that it sucks. This, like many posts, doesn't have a specific problem for us to help with, no logs or stack traces have been posted, and the subject of the complaint shows just how terrible your understanding of application security is.
So, while there is legitimate criticism of some of Nextcloud's design choices, this isn't it. And at the risk of sounding a little gatekeepy, if you post "nextcloud updates break everything" with no context you probably should spend some time gaining a better understanding of how internet facing services work and make an attempt to fix the problem (probably misconfiguration, and in this desktop client case probably a heap of un-updated local software installed alongside the client), which I'm sure people would find if they did the bare minimum of reading a few log files or any of the other things that come with being an application admin.
Wasn't OP complaining about the Windows desktop client? What has that to do with the server setup, Docker, etc? People can have the exact same issues on the client side even if the Nextcloud instance is professionally managed by a large organization.
I mentioned the client in there (4th paragraph), but mine was more of a general rant on the overall low effort that seems to have been put in to figuring out what the actual problem was. And that it is relatively common among people in the self hosting community to assume that Nextcloud is a lot simpler than it is. It's a huge cloud suite consisting of many applications, clients, plugins, proxies, caching, database, etc. You need to have a pretty good understanding of how it all works, and how to investigate a problem, and ideally you should be testing before upgrades. Large organizations often even test endpoint applications like the desktop client and push out only tested versions to users via policy or some kind of endpoint management.
I can't really draw many conclusions from the very little information provided in this post, but I suspect OPs windows machine is not in an entirely stable state, which is what is causing some of these update issues.
And, I put some of the blame for Nextcloud under-representing it's complexity on Nextcloud's marketing and AIO. You absolutely can install it without understanding anything, and that's a little dangerous in my opinion because it is actually quite complex and you will probably end up breaking it at some point and need to dig in to fix it.
You're right but if an installer renders a computer inoperable until reboot (tried in another PC, same result, doesn't only kill explorer.exe because if I run it again via taskmgr, the taskbar is broken and non functional until reboot) it means it has been pushed to the "stable" channel without being tested a single time.
The problem is present since 2021 and it's a bit ridiculous now https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/3551
In the topic you can see the devs "ok fixed in next release" => next release didn't fix it (=nobody actually clicked the exe before releasing, it just passed all automated tests), then "ok so next release gonna fix it", and again again
It has been said to gracefully restart explorer.exe instead of crashing it, it still chooses violence for a restart. It asks "do you want to reboot" twice.
I like having the bleeding edge stuff, running nextcloud in docker under the "latest" tag, but those are clearly nightlies
I think this one https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/issues/5369 is probably the more relevant, and also open, issue. However even in that issue people claim you can choose not to. The argument is only that it suggests restarting explorer and also rebooting and that this is annoying. So you never get a prompt, it just dies?
I agree though that the amount of time where it was force rebooting is pretty bad, and it looks like the rollout of the patch was mishandled. I also should probably admit that I've never touched the windows client, my environment is entirely Linux and Android. The Linux client even with file manager integration doesn't require restarts of anything.