Leaving Nextcloud

After many years of use, I finally say the last goodbye to Nextcloud, the self hosted solution I used to sync my calendar, files and little more.

I was using Nextcloud from before the fork from Owncloud, so I can say it was a long ride, but in the end the conclusion arrived.

Why to change ? Well, basically because I am sick and tired to fight with its update process. At the beginning I was using a custom installation and the update was a pain. Then I switched to use the package provided by Archlinux but the problems were not solved.

The biggest one is that PHP 8.x was non supported for a couple of major release (21 and 22 IIRC) and since the server also hosted some public sites, it became increasly harder to keep update the system and Nextcloud. In the end I was locked to an old 21.x release.
But as the new release come out, I realise it will became harder the more I wait to upgrade. So I removed the lock on the Nextcloud package in the pacman.conf file and run an update, after all what can go wrong ? Well, everything.

Not only you cannot upgrade from more than 1 major release back (for example, 21.x->22.x and not 21.x->23.x), which I can somewhat understand, but even the upgrade process is broken, so after upgrading from 21.x to 22.x and from 22.x to 23.x, I ended up in and endless loop of "this app need to be upgraded"/launch the upgrade process/success/redirect back to step 1.
Not what a user (even an advanced one) want.

After a lot of work and attempts, which nearly cost me all the Wordpress installations, I finally give up and decided get it out of the way.
BTW, I don't really understand how every Open Source project tends to became a nightmare to use if not on the developer's machine (yes, akonady, I am also looking at you) once it became a little more complex. Or better, I get that it is a lot more fun to add new features, but come on, a software should be usable even from the average user, especially in a default configuration.

Anyway, with Nextcloud out the game I still need to have a way to sync my calendars and the files, but what to use ?
My requirements are failry simple: sync the files from the phone and a couple of PC, one of which is dualboot Linux/Win and just keep track of my calendars.

Sooo, enter Radicale and Synchthing

Radicale is a CalDav/CardDav server to allow to sync calendars and contacts.

Synchthing is a file synchronization server/client that allow you to keep one or more directories on different systems synched. It has also and Android app.

Both of them are pretty simple to set up and pretty fast, the only downside is that there is not a "real" web interface to access the data (but there is one to configure them), which can be a problem with the calendar if you need to add something without using your phone (well, it can be an idea for a little desktop app) or some other already configured software.