Cloudron 9.0.15 - upgrade experience / questions

[timconsidine]

I held off upgrading from 8.3.2 to avoid v9 teething issues, but eventually took the plunge.

1. Generally the UI is more modern and good , as others have complemented.
   But I HATE HATE HATE that the left sidebar appears not to be collapsible. Such a huge waste of screen space, especially if your browser has its own left side panel for multiple panels / tabs / spaces (whatever lingo the browser uses).
   Have I missed a config option ?
   If not, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE make Cloudron's left sidebar collapsible. ASAP !!
   Or even allow an option to hide all the rarely used left sidebar options under the user icon like it was before.
   I don't understand this UI design choice.
   Not wanting to stand in the way of progress, it is simply INEFFICIENT.
   And I see ZERO benefit or advantage from making the left sidebar fixed.

My guess is that the new v9 UI has been designed on an assumption of a large screen, or making the browser full-screen on smaller displays. I have a large 27" screen, and maybe it looks ok/works ok on that. But at least 50% of my time is spent on a 15" laptop where browser is not full screen (so I can quickly access other apps). Please consider users like me who are working on smaller screens and multi-tasking between apps/browsers.

2. The list view of My Apps is not good.
   Previously it provided 1 click access to logs/terminal/file manager.
   Now the user has to do 2 clicks.
   Probably a direct result of wasted space in left sidebar not allowing space for icons to be displayed.
   This is a distinctly retrograde change.
   Please allow one click access again (shrink some columns, make left sidebar collapsible).

3. In the Grid view of MyApps, I only get 3 apps because of the non-collapsible and over-wide sidebar. I have to reduce the browser zoom to 85% to get 4 displayed, or make it full-screen, which is not always ideal. And Cloudron should not force such choices on me.

4. Startup :

• initially got error message "Waiting for platform to initialize" - left it 20 minutes then decided to reboot the server, which solved it
• reboot then took ~25 minutes, ~3m for the server (normal), then ~10 minutes for Redis to start up completely, then ~10m for containers to start.
  Is this going to be the case going forwards for every server reboot ?.
  If so, not acceptable.
• ok, I understand that I have 120 apps installed, but :
  (a) it never used to take this long,
  (b) I have 64Gb RAM and 600Gb free disk space, so it looks to me like a Cloudron v9 issue, not a server hardware issue.
• I did notice when checking system that I am still on Ubuntu 22.04, not 24.04, but not sure this would make much difference.

I'm looking forward to using v9 but frankly the sidebar issue significantly reduces my user happiness factor, and I will be really dissatisfied if a Cloudron reboot is going to take 20 mins each and every time (impact on app usability/availability).

I'm also glad v9 is out so Cloudron team can focus on improving Cloudron as an offering. Hopefully there are many benefits to v9 under the hood, but from a purely UI point of view, the more modern appearance does not justify loss of efficiency/functionality (would rather still be on 8.3.2) and doesn't justify the months of work on the release.

I've tried to avoid making this a rant.

[timconsidine]

Left side bar : wasted space at least 20 pixels after widest entry ?

Status column in My Apps :
icon for login type, icon for update available BUT text for status !!!
Easily changed to green/amber/red/purple? for 4 states
Huge gap between status and final column
This would save enough pixels to avoid hiding logs/terminal/files under an ellipsis.

[girish]

Thanks for feedback. The main goal for v9 is to rewrite the full UI in vuejs. There is over 10 years of UI code with lots of quirks, error handling etc to port over. Mostly, we have paid the most attention to just getting the functionality at par and working. This was already 10 months in the working and at some point we have to get it out and not get hung up on details.

That said, I understand the above information is not interesting or relevant to users, so I don't expect them to empathize with us All I can say, is that in the next release, we will focus on making the UI better.

[timconsidine]

@girish thanks for the clarification.

Yep, it must have been a beast of a project, I do sympathise.

Onwards and upwards- keep up the good work and look to exploring v9.

[nebulon]

Thanks for the honest feedback, always appreciated!

The left side-bar was commented on by others before. We plan to make that collapsable (on mobile it already is, so this is more about deciding which collapsable style we want to go with) for the next release.

Similar to the quick actions, like opening the logs viewer for an app. Currently, the ... button on all items in the UI collects all actions. With the next release we will look into all those and pick common ones to provide as direct actions on the list items.