First 21 update is out, as are minor 20 and 19 releases

We’ve made the first 21 update available today, as well as updates for 20 and 19. Remember that it’s time to start planning for an upgrade if you are still on 19 – we will only maintain it for a few more months.

Nextcloud Hub 21 is here

The 21.0.1 fixes are all minor and we have now made the new release available to 30% of the servers on 20.0.9! This means you have a chance of 1 out of 3 that your updater will offer you 21.0.1 if you’re on the latest 20.

Note that Nextcloud 21 drops support for PHP 7.2. We would generally consider it unhelpful to offer to break your installation, so you won’t see the new version available for upgrade until your server moves to PHP 7.3 or newer!

If you are on PHP 7.3 and don’t see the update, you’re in the unlucky 70% of users but there is a work-around: set your update channel to beta and update to 20.0.9. You should then see the update for 21.0.1 become available!

The coming weeks we’ll make the 21 release available for more of our users.

What do I get from 21?

In one word: SPEED! The 21 release introduced a lot of performance improvements, most of which you get by ‘just’ upgrading. There’s more to be had, so let me share the highlights.

• 🚀 High Performance Back-end for Nextcloud Files: reduces server load from desktop clients and web interface polling by 90% while delivering instant notifications to users.
• ➕🚀 And a wide range of performance improvements all over on top, decreasing loading times of pages and reducing load on the server
• 🤝 Collaborative features: new Whiteboard, author colours in Text and Document Templates to increase team productivity
• 🗨 Nextcloud Talk: debuts message status indicators, a raise hand feature, a group conversation description and more!
• 📫 A range of Groupware improvements like drag’n’drop and nicer threading in Mail and syncing social media avatars in Contacts.

📺 Watch the live Nextcloud Hub 21 post-announcement Q&A on YouTube!

Of course, there is MUCH more, and you can read all about it in our announcement blog for Nextcloud Hub 21.

Please stay up to date

As always, minor releases include stability and security improvements that are designed to be a safe and quick upgrade.

You can find the full change log of fixes and improvements for 21.0.1, 20.0.9 and 19.0.10 on our website.

Note: 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!

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 painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

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 system administrator.