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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

Random comment - I find it interesting that I have such a strong association of open source = github, so when something is on gitlab, I automatically deduct mental points, even though that's not fair at all.

I think gitlab's sidebar is probably not helping with my association, it's too similar to bitbucket or other "enterprise-y" type websites.

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Personally I find the UI and terminology so willfully - almost obstinately - different to github's, that it's an absolute pain to navigate. I'm sure I could get used to it, but just now I just wanted to jump to the code, and it took roughly 30 seconds to find it hidden inside the 'repository' tab.

The link is already in a page similar to the main page of repo on Github. Open and link and scroll up?

Ugh, it's a link to the `README`, with a fixed sidebar. I partially take back my original comment, but I'd still argue that it's not the most helpful UI.

How can we make it more helpful?

Yeah, some of it is just familiarity but I do think GH truly nailed UI to quickly evaluate a project while also being good for working in long-term, at least on desktop—I have complaints about their mobile UI, but when I'm using that it's usually because I'm just curious and messing around anyway, so it's not a big deal. It's also nice and snappy.

[EDIT] I also assume a higher likelihood that key persons on the project are the contrarian-for-contrary's-sake sort if they're not on GH. Not that it's certain, mind, but that it's a bit more likely.

Maybe I've spent enough time with GitLab, but I find GitHub's UI annoying.

Not browsing the repository / looking at a file? Can't go to the "jump to file" page.

Not at the root of a repository? Can't access releases.

Their "mobile UI" (which, I think, is being rehauled?)

I don't think your issues with Gitlab's UI are the UI's fault. In addition to clicking on the "repository" link (which is a common term used by both Git and Github themselves) or scrolling up as others have noted, you can also click on any of the first three links immediately under the gitlab logo ("httpx", "project", and "details") to get to a view similar to github's default.

Even ignoring any possible trust issues with Microsoft's ownership of Github, I think the tech world's reliance on a single host is rather dangerous. For instance, there's a story from today about the Spanish gov't ordering Github to remove a repo[1]. And there were technical issues for Chef when someone removed their code in protest of ICE[2]. Git can be decentralized, and that's one of the good things about it, but we the community (myself included) are not decentralizing very much. Github isn't really to blame, since they made a pretty great host and made so many things easy to do with it. It's in their best interest to get every using it. But it's not necessarily in the community's best interest to be relying on it to the extent that we do, to the extent where people deduct mental points for non-Github projects. I say this having done such mental deductions myself in the past, but now I think alternatives to Github are necessary and should be celebrated. Don't necessarily stop using Github, but if you keep using Github, mirror the code to at least one more host, be it Gitlab or elsewhere.

Or maybe it's just inevitable that what was once distributed always becomes centralized again? (To that end I'm reminded of the book The Master Switch by Tim Wu. He discusses similar cycles happening to various "information empires".)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21395629 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21025037

Very good point. I'm so annoyed by the tech world's tendency to fall into the "winner take all" phenomenon that happens, and how this gradually chips away at the rights of users in very subtle ways. Case in point is Chrome, and how much power it has over the direction of the web now - leading towards a walled garden web.

httpx maintainer here. I chose gitlab at a time where I used the community edition inside the company I worked in. We had our onprem infrastructure and needed some private git management dashboard a-la github, and gitlab (even requiring gobs of RAM) saved us.

I also decided to close-source this project initially, as I didn't know where it was headed, and github didn't provide private repositories at the time.

It also provided CI out-of-the-box, whereas if I had chosen github, I'd have to integrate it with travis, or circle-ci, or yet another third-party that required me to update my configs every 6 months. I can tell you only this feature makes the decision totally worth it.

Also, gitlab has way more dev-friendly features than github, which has been recently only copying what gitlab already does.

I do mirror the project to github, in case anyone from there wants to contribute, so I'm not that narrowminded. However, I do prefer gitlab, and it's where I do most of my personal work nowadays.

I do the same as well.

My brain: GitHub or bust.

Thanks for the feedback! The UX Research team has an open Epic for outlining sidebar improvements and it'd be great to hear any suggestions you may have. Feel free to leave a comment in https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/577 or share additional thoughts here!

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