Try Nextcloud-AIO and install the Preview Generator as well. (note that you will need to run it manually the first time). I did struggle as well, before I found the AIO. Now I'm happy. :-)

I would say Seafile, and especially their webserver "seahub", which is written in Python and Django, is just pure garbage. I'm using Seafile since 2012, and I'm honestly so sick of its problems. It just crashes for no good reason, and the encryption is extremely mediocre (there's been issues about it). I have it behind my VPN so security isn't a big deal.

Because it's written with the garbage Python + Django, just try moving your installation to a new version... and you'll be stuck with a very specific version of a bunch of libraries or otherwise seahub won't even launch... and to make it even better, you don't get anything on stdout/stderr to tell you what's wrong, unless you launch Seahub in a specific configuration mode (WSAPI or something?).

Seafile has become so bad that I stopped caring about tracking its issues. I set my docker container to just restart on health checks' failure, and forgot about it. My status tracker shows that it's shutdown, and eventually it'll restart. "Hey look, Seafile is down." And I respond "That's OK, dear, just give it another 15 minutes and it'll restart". This is my status on Seafile.

I think Seahub needs a complete revamp.

Those guys coded Seafile like a decade ago and they don't care about fixing it anymore. Github is cluttered with issues.

i dont understand how some people have lots of issue with NC and some people say its all good

i have tried many times to switch to NC, It always slow (given that it running locally next to me, i expect it to be snappy) and throws me some error after somedays. I really wanted to use NC, so many things in one package

NC AIO has been good for me and support has been awesome. Seafuke is Chinese so I don’t trust it. At least NC is German and has some privacy stuff.

Filerun is good

Don't get me wrong NextCloud is great and has a lot of helpful features out of the box, but I moved from this to just use;

• Samba: for mounting drives shares.
• CalDav: for shared calendars.
• CardDav: for shared contacts.
• Memos: for note taking, great little room that allows Markdown note with tagging for easy search and filter.
• Espo CRM: for logging communication with businesses, like utilities providers (comes in handy to refer to during disputes)

I'm also looking at installing a self-hosted office suite for word and Excel documents but haven't set this up yet.

I love idea of Nextcloud, but its overall concept of doing everything, but nothing well enough was one of the reasons I've decided to build S3Drive. We squeeze most of the "file-management" experience out of the protocol itself. That means that all you need to self-host is the S3 storage server (e.g. MinIO)... but if you don't feel like it just yet you can buy S3 from anyone else (e.g. Backblaze / Wasabi / Synology / Cloudflare etc.) and enable 100% Rclone compatible E2E encryption to protect your privacy.

Disable logging.

Sounds like you need a Synology NAS...