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Comment by steve_taylor | Hacker News Reader

If you want to properly compete with an existing product that doesn't have a polished UI (e.g. GitLab), about the easiest way you can do it is deliver a polished UI. Unfortunately, OneDev's UI is even less polished than GitLab's.

However, it's a big project and I commend the authors.

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I guess the main differentiators that OneDev, Gitea etc. have vs. self-hosted Gitlab is their more focused feature sets and small footprints. Gitlab's minimum 4 cores, 4-8gb of RAM just to run at all is prohibitive for some use cases. I use Gitea as a locally-hosted fallback so critical IaC repos are still available and can be accessed by things like flux in a (local) k8s even if Github isn't reachable. I don't need Gitlab's feature set for that, I could do with plain git repos over SSH, but having a lightweight UI is actually really nice, and I'll put up with some quirks as long as the basic functionality works well.

This. I chose Gitea instead of Gitlab specifically because of the high resource consumption. If OneDev turns out to be a sweet spot in between the two (I really wish I had CI/CD built into my VCS server), I might just switch.

Is the UI polish what bitters you most about GitLab, and would make you switch?

For me, yes. That it's unintuitive and messy is something I can get used to. The weight, resource, usage and slowness I can not. It feels like JIRA.

Thanks for the comment. What area of OneDev UI you feel is unpolished?

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