I tried Nextcloud a while back and was not impressed - I had issues withe the speed of the Windows sync that were determined to be "normal" with no roadmap to getting fixed. I'm now planning to move off Windows desktop so that won't be an issue - so I thought I'd try again.
I went to nextcloud.com, clicked on Download-> Nextcloud server -> All-in-one -> Docker image - Setup AIO. This took me to the github README at Docker section. I'm already running docker for other things so I read the instructions, setup a new filesystem for my data directory and ran the suggested docker command with an appropriate "--env NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=". I'm then left with a terminal running docker in the foreground - not a great way to run a background server but ok, I've been around for a while and can figure out how to make it autostart in the background ongoing. So I move on to the next step - open my browser at the appropriate URL and I'm presented with a simple page asking me to "Log in using your Nextcloud AIO passphrase:". I don't have a Nextcloud AIO passphrase and nothing I've read so far has mentioned it. When I search for it I get some results on how to reset it, but not much help. I could probably figure that out too, but after reading some more I found that Nextcloud requires a public hostname and can't work with a local name or IP address. I'm already running my home LAN with OpenVPN and access it from anywhere as "local" - I don't really want to create a new path into my home network just for Nextcloud.
I'm sorry - I know this sounds like a disgruntled rant and I guess it is. I just want to check that I'm not missing obvious things before I give up again. All I want is a simple file sync setup like onedrive but without the microsoft.
Many "self hosters" simply aren't comfortable with the basics and expect things to be just an app you install. A simple two-tier app/db architecture is too complex for them (hence the prevalence of sqllite these days).
I've run nextcloud for many years and was simply surprised to hear that it's "difficult to manage and slow". My experience has been quite the contrary - it's been easy to keep up to date and has never failed an upgrade or lost data. And it performs "well enough" since I don't use low-cost hardware for servers.
My only complaint is that I need to run occ from a terminal rather than having a web interface for it. Makes running it in a k8s pod kinda annoying.
To be fair, it is slow on VPS with single core CPU and 2GB RAM. But that's not normal..
one of the main reasons SQLite is gaining in popularity is because people are realizing it has higher performance than separate databases in many usecases. Keeping the communication in-process cuts a lot of overhead (network, memcpys). The fact that you also don't have to go through the trouble of configuring a separate service is just a bonus :-)