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.

Nobody said "syncthing" on this thread yet, so that will be me.

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'm sure their enterprise customers are having the same poor experience you're having.

And FYI nothing is really tested in NC nor nothing is really 100% done, everything is always at 75% and then gets replaced by another half assed implementation.

Just switch to Syncthing, I ditched Nextcloud years ago after many issues with both the desktop client and the server, 2 of them leading to complete data loss. It's slow, bloated, poorly made and full of bugs.

If you need a web based file manager you can set up Syncthing on your server and run Filebrowser or similar. As a bonus it's like 10x faster than nextcloud to use. If you need WebDAV then SFTPGo provides that nicely.

Nextcloud.... Sucks. I gave up and decided to just run discreet services for my needs. Ends up being far more reliable.

I've used both self-hosted Nextcloud, and an instance set up by my school. I have the client on two different Windows machines, and I can confirm the update either tries to kill explorer.exe, which doesn't work half of the time, or forces a restart, so you're not alone with this issue! I also hate the client UI and how it displays conflicted files when multiple people are accessing the same folder. The whole file sync thing feels like a poor attempt to copy Dropbox. My school discontinued Nextcloud support last year because hosting/maintenance took too many resources, they switched to Microsoft i.e. OneDrive and it works much better.

Update:

Today just to show the bug to someone else, I installed the update via Winget on a windows 10 PC and... nothing. It installed silently, didn't bother with asking a reboot nor crashed explorer.exe. So I went to another windows 11 PC and tried again with the silent updater and... silently updated without badly crashing explorer.

Either nextcloud fixed the installer for real or Microsoft fixed the reason explorer was crashing in the windows update that was pushed yesterday

Finally the days where all the explorer windows will disappear when updating NC desktop are gone?

Running nextcloud (non docker version) and I don't see near so many client updates - usually once every few weeks, which would be a reasonable expected pace. Server updates are less frequent.

On Windows (all of my primary devices), I just install the NC client update and skip the explorer restart, pending full reboot later. Tis the nature of literally anything that deeply integrates with Explorer. I've seen explorer "death" during updates from several vendors that have similar explorer plugins, not just NC. Explorer sometimes just decides to nope out even without NC updating.

Now on one device I hadn't opened for a while, I saw NC run two updates in a row, but that was my fault for procrastinating the first one.

Here's the desktop release history: https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/releases
I don't see a "one every day" within the block of time between Dec 6 and today, unless you had the release candidate builds which may have been more frequent in a few spots.

I abandoned nextcloud entirely a couple years ago. It was just too damn flaky (self hosted via docker).

Should install your apps with Scoop or Chocolatey anyway. Easy to update and without all the bullshit the usual installer wants to shove down your throat.

I turn off auto updates for everything - OS, phone apps, everything. Last thing I need is for stuff to hang, reboot, stop working, or work differently with no notice, which has happened too many times to count.

Every update I do is done while I'm there, with validation after to ensure everything works.