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Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted to like GitLab but after having used in a few BigCo's I just can't get round to it.

It's really slow and unstable. It's also constantly trying to push different messages into my face that I don't care about nor can I switch off those messages (Autodevops for example). Some of the ui tooltips constantly block the links I want to click on, search it REALLY slow and almost useless. This is the paid gitlab.com SaaS.

Also after reading one of their postmortems about an incident where someone deleted a production DB, it just did not inspire confidence.

Also they have taken a ton of VC money, not sure how long the "not Microsoft" argument is going to stand.

Current client is on GitHub and the experience is definitely much better. Not happy about their MS ties and tech-bro misogyny problems. Hopeful for sourcehut tho.

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Self-hosted on-premise GitLab is much nicer to use than the SaaS gitlab.com instance.

A few years ago (when I used gitlab.com regularly), the hosted version was quite slow and felt like a buggy beta-testing environment. Not sure if it's better nowadays. On the other hand, I'm running two on-prem instances of GitLab for a few years now, and they've been working flawlessly and are fast. (One of them is now upgraded to the Premium plan.)

I agree with everything you've said, and I'm a pretty staunch advocate for gitlab.

I hope that the powers that be are listening.

I still think they're the best of the AIO SCM tools, but I think people are starting to consider disrupting them because of bloat (UI, performance).

gitea seems pretty promising. of course there isn't one canonical instance that is "official", which puts it in a bit of a different category (but maybe that's also a good thing for its continuing openness)

So, yes. Gitlab is a bit crap, but equally it also just feels better than GitHub for self-hosted software and more importantly actually running a company.

The company I work for is in finance, but we manage a lot of things on gitlab to take advantage of git, gitlab can just about facilitate this, whereas GitHub I just don't think would be able to.

Also what's this about tech-bro misogyny? As a regular code reviewer on GitHub I actively don't really want to know anything about the contributors, so not sure what this refers to. Internal culture?

You know what works great for self-hosting? Gitea and Gogs. Personally I gave-up on even trying Gitlab after reading the docs, the hardware needs alone are in a different world from Gogs.

> Also what's this about tech-bro misogyny?

GitHub has kept some widely disliked (for good reasons) people on its board, and censored user content on several different directions by now. Including completely deleting some projects. It's the kind of thing that doesn't really matter to you, until it does, and if it eventually does, it really sucks.

But yeah, avoiding that kind of problem is one of the reasons to self-host.

>GitHub has kept some widely disliked (for good reasons) people on its board

Why not provide something, anything non-vague to go on? That's a bit of a dead end if anyone wants to know more.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

To be fair these are quite old. I thought there were newer things as well but not sure.

github has had 30 outage incidents this year so far, few of which even acknowledge a root cause or offer any sort of lessons learned or remediation announcements.

maybe this will be the shot across the bow Microsoft needs to hopefully improve the github experience, but i doubt it. they have a track-record of splurging cash for things they really want that could absolutely drive revenue, but without much qualified ability to shepherd the product lifecycle past the initial commitment of IP and marketing.

Is MS going to and or trying to move this to a Windows backend like they did with the one phone they bought? Can't recall the name.

Sourcehut & Gitea are cool, but I don't see them as being in the same market as Github & Gitlab (& Bitbucket). There's pros and cons to both "ends" of the market (minimal, efficient, light -vs- big supported corporate featureful), and there's probably room for both.

The problem is Gitlab has really gone off the deep end of "heavy", and - combined with inconsistent / confusing UX throughout - it makes it a poor fit for even the most well-resourced bigcorp install.

It's a pity Phabricator didn't take off. It seemed like a great contender in that space.

I also find GitLab's UI pretty chaotic, and a lot of space is wasted on "UI chrome".

Gitlab went public last year, so VCs no longer have much power over it.

Yeah, I don't understand those autodevops tooltips either.

I've yet to see an explanation of "autodevops", or what it does or how it works, that actually makes the feature make sense to me.

They are simply ci/cd templates for building specific types of projects. If you turn autodevops on, then it will apply the template based on files found in the repo. Like a less opinionated Heroku that can deploy to your own k8s cluster.

I have never really had a project generic enough that autodevops would work. But I think I did at one point copy one of their templates as a basis for my own gitlab-ci.yaml file.

I think it also handles automatically configuring some things that you can't configure in your ci files, like prometheus monitoring.

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