I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.

Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.

Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.

Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.

Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).

It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.

I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.

Depends.

If there are no external volumes and the container is in its own network without any other containers, then any malware in the container shouldn’t be able to reach / affect the host server, because it’s isolated.

Docker is a container manager, but that doesn’t say anything if you don’t know what containers are.

Containers are basically isolated apps. For example, take something like Nextcloud. Nextcloud can run in a Docker container, which means that it runs in an isolated environment completely separated from the user’s system. If Nextcloud breaks, the user’s server won’t be affected at all, because it’s running isolated.

Why is this useful? Well, it’s useful because dependencies and such automatically update. Nextcloud for example, is dependent on PHP and if you install Nextcloud directly on your server, you’ll need to ensure that PHP 8 has been installed and set up properly. If PHP (or the required PHP extensions) aren’t properly installed, Nextcloud won’t work. Or, maybe if there’s a Nextcloud update that requires a new version of PHP (PHP 9 or 10 in the future), you’ll have to manually update PHP to the newer version.

All that dependency management is completely gone with containers. The container itself automatically installs and sets up a proper environment for the app that’s running. So in the case of Nextcloud, the PHP binaries, extensions, and all the other stuff is all automatically included without the developer having to do anything at all. Just run one command and your entire Nextcloud instance is automatically updated.