Good luck explaining how to do any of this to my parents, for example. For someone with a technical background that's feasible, for someone with an it background it's even easy. For the other 90 or 95% of people who are actually supposed to buy and use these things, it isn't. They don't even know something like this can be done, let alone that it should be done.
Creat
I've had nothing but issues with NC instant upload, and stopped using it. It's error prone and needs constant hand holding for no good reason. It didn't handle taking a picture and then deleting it instantly very well (and will throw your notifications at you for this, often more than 1). When you have limited connectivity it will utterly confuse itself and ask you to resolve conflicts for 100 files for no reason, when it could just checksum server and client files and notice they are all the exact same. Also when set to only upload on WiFi, and not being connected to WiFi it often still spams notifications that the "upload failed", despite not being supposed to upload anything. And btw. it could upload files just fine, they failed only because upload on mobile is disabled!
It's a nightmare. Commonly also referred to as a cluster fuck.
The closest small one is about 1 km, a reasonably sized one for stocking up is 5 km or so. I have never walked to either in 5+ years of living here. Even the closer one is like a 10 minute walk (ish), and then I would have to carry back what I bought, which also means I can barely buy anything. 5 km is more like an hour by foot one way, so that's just not happening, ever.
I usually take my bike to the closer one, or the cargo bike to the bigger one. I also pass by the smaller one on the way home from work (I commute by bike). The fact that I own bikes is why there's never any rain to walk anywhere, basically. Additionally, there is very little sense in taking a (relatively small capacity) bike to a big store when a cargo bike is available. I also don't own a car. I don't know a single person who would regularly walk 1 km+ for shopping, but I also don't know anyone who doesn't own any form of personal transport. Most would usually take a bike, and take a car for bigger or heavier trips.
Taking a bus or tram/train for grocery shopping does happen for some, but highly depends on the local situation and town or city layout if that can bring useful time savings. Unless you live is the middle of nowhere, bus and train schedules are anywhere from every 10 to 30 minutes or so, more frequent in dense areas where there's multiple lines.
Edit: for context, I live on the outskirts of a medium sized city (250k inhabitants), but my town only has 3500 or so. The small supermarket is on the literal other side of that town, the bigger one is one town over (opposite direction of city). Distance to the city is also only only 10 km or so (to the center), but there happen to be no "attractive" supermarkets in that direction for me.
Thanks for the update!
I don't understand the change in regards to how 'mention' suggestions are handled. When viewing this changelog post in summit, they show identical text. When I started writing this comment I noticed that they are in fact different in the markup/source code, as seen above the input box.
So what effect does that change have in practice, or does it functionally do the same just less verbose?
I'm not seeing it either (yet), and I'm on Haas-os.
Edit: nevermind, manually checking for the update in settings/system/updates made it show up
Yes, it's the first of the month, which is the most heavy of all days for the the giveaways. They sometimes come out on other days, but only a few.
They recently announced that this would be necessary. They also said that this would mostly be during peak times, so the moment the Amazon prime codes are released for example. Assuming this is correct, the workaround would be to just wait a day, or 2, or 5.
As far as analogies go, is pretty far off. It doesn't hold even for basic behaviors of the two cases, let alone complex ones. A better analogy would be that you buy a (small) car that always happens to come with an included, free trailer for more cargo capacity. You can of course take it off and have a small car. And it's also as magic trailer that doesn't take up any space at all when not in use, but can also not be sold.
I'm actually not a fan, an am also using it somewhat reluctantly personally, though self hosted. I've had my issues with it, but an still using it because it solves some issues that are much harder to solve without it. I'm not using the contacts/calendar functionality.
But your original statement was that you couldn't understand who would need calendar and contacts (in their file sharing app). There's enough I object to in this statement that I wrote my comment. First of, in this context, specifically in their article/blog/whatever, it's about nextcloud as a whole, not the fact that it can do file sharing. That's what it evolved from, but not all it is any more, more better or worse. Secondly, it's about an advertised alternative to O365, which includes the very common and almost universal requirement for teams (be it a company, family, ...) to have events (=calendar) like schedule meetings with people (=contacts). Even if you work with just like 5 people you are probably gonna need that. There you probably want to share files, but probably more so it's about the office functionality and collaborative, simultaneous editing of files. Obviously replacing Word, PowerPoint, Excel. And yes, Outlook (calendar,& contacts, also email).
This isn't meant for individuals who need a few GB to store some files. It's for teams of some description that need office like, cloud based tools.
Your analogy doesn't make any sense, so I assume you really don't know. So let me explain:
If you buy a 4wd, it's always a 4wd, usually that means s relatively large vehicle. You might be able to turn it to 2wd, but it doesn't make the car smaller. If you just needed a tiny car in all (or most cases), you can't push a button to make it smaller. You always drive around the extra equipment to possibly make it 4wd.
Nextcloud is plugin based. Assuming this isn't locked away on an instance like this, you can literally push a button and make that whole functionality go away everywhere. You can fully remove that 'clutter', if that's of no use to you. They are offering it always, as it adds no additional effort on the hosters side: they don't need to add gear boxes or whatever to make it have calendar & contacts. If you don't want/need it, turn it off and it's gone.
Who ever wanted a file sync platform that also does calendaring and contacts?
Most O365 & exchange users? If you just want file sync, this isn't for you. If you want a collaborative (online) office suite that can also sync files, it is. It's meant to be able to replace the whole O365 stack, which includes Outlook.
You can also just not use that part, or any part you don't need. This is basic NC functionality that has been there for a very long time, so why shouldn't it be part of the package?
This is like the 3rd or 4th time this (mis)information is posted, and has to be corrected in comments. There's a very large discrepancy between "all of Denmark" and "this one tiny ministry in Denmark". Journalism really has just become "how to out-clickbait others, no matter if objectively false".
but it is a fault of WiFi as a choice for that application. Just because it does wireless communication doesn't mean it's suited for any application that needs a wireless protocol. Using it for very-low traffic applications is simply not what it was designed to do, and it has significant negative effects if you do. Any device you add basically slows down any other device by a bit. And wifi network you add in a physical area decreases the effectiveness of all other wifi networks in it's vicinity. In even medium densly populated areas, wifi is already borderline unusable due to congestion. Your proposed (dedicated) hub is a good idea for network isolation, assuming it's designed and configured correctly, but that also comes with more and frankly just as bad security implications, just different ones. To be clear, having like a light bulb or two wifi is a fine choice. For 50 or a whole smart home network, it no longer is.
Both Zigbee and Matter do not rely on cloud connectivity as a protocol, though many of the manufacturers implementations do effectly add that on top: you get the exact solution you propose here as well. At least with these standards you can control everyhing locally, if you want to, and you don't congest the spectrum nearly as much as wifi does.