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Comment by alex_suzuki | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with the general observation of the article, the tone and wording feels needlessly harsh and subjective. Sentences like „I could go to GitLab, but they have their own fair share of issues and a disgusting UI/UX.“ really diminish the article and by association, also the author.

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It's a personal blog. The author has no obligation to keep it to the standard of a trade magazine. Blogs are supposed to be subjective and it's okay for a blog post to be harsh if the author feels so.

Sure. Just saying that for me personally, it’s a turn-off and makes me take the article less seriously.

For me it's not just the lack of professionalism but the writing makes the author sound pretty junior and inexperienced with how the world works. Not that there's anything wrong with that (we've all been there). But it can cheapen the discussion and feel like what really needs to be untangled is overlooked by stuff like "I was upset because they changed the UI and then I got used to it." Not very interesting details and not very useful thing to discuss.

The author is a college freshman, and that seems pretty par for the course for someone in their late teens. It's not really an "article" targeted for HN critical review, just a blog post on a personal site.

This is what I noticed too.

We have a kid with no experience in the real world telling us what they think. Why should we care? I actually don't

Nice display of arrogance there.

I appreciated the specific word choice there; 'disgusting' implies a strong, visceral reaction, as if to say GitLab's work is so far from the author's taste that it blocks them from considering the product, and didn't seem all that harsh if that's how the author actually feels.

In a counterintuitive way, it was nice to read -- it says that UI is important; that it shouldn't be an afterthought; that it has the power to actively invite people in or greatly repulse them instead.

what is so bad about the UI/UX? i'm not a frequent gitlab user but it doesnt strike me as anything out of the ordinary

A few things I personally don't like:

- Use of space: GitLab has more empty space across the site. Elements have a bit too much padding for my tastes and are spaced a bit too far apart. Valuable screen space (top center) contains a lot of needless information on GitLab (table headers, project ID, language breakdown, a prompt to add a CONTRIBUTING file) which is either not present or located off to the side on GitHub.

- Color and typography: GitHub is one of the best sites at this, using pops of color for important buttons and really fun typography. I love how GitHub has your avatar "speak" a commit description, it's a great little touch. GitLab's design feels like it has less personality. Quick comparison: https://imgur.com/a/Ejd1Q1X

- Attention to detail: A bit less of it on GitLab -- icons and text don't vertically align in some places; several of the dropdown menus could use a bit of visual improvement, or have an ill-fitting item or two; in my screenshot above, GitLab's "Commit message" and "Target Branch" have inconsistent capitalization.

The main page has a huge prominent “Get Free Trial” button, while the “Sign In” button is small and hidden in the menu. A common dark pattern.

The performance is sluggish.

There's always a lot of buttons and stuff on the screen that most users will probably never use, making the UI cluttered.

I actually agree with the author. Using GitLab is unpleasant. I’ve also tried cgit, Rhodecode, Gitea, Bitbucket, &c. GitLab just feels cludgey, personally.

I find comments on “professionalism” about a personal blog to be rather snooty and gatekeepy in tone. Reminds me of the unpleasant atmosphere of Lobste.rs.

I don't understand why GitLab (as in gitlab.com) doesn't focus more on the discovery part in order to make people feel more welcome.

I was using github.com/explore almost daily while it lasted. The trending repositories by language were an amazing tool to discover new tools and ideas.

I really wish GitLab had something equivalent to this!

I would probably agree that GitHub is better for discovery than GitLab, but the OP's comment is funny to me, because having worked extensively with both, I'm a much bigger fan of GitLab's UI and UX for builders. Groups and nesting are massive when it comes to being able to work with teams, and the fact that you can set options across groups at any level eliminates whole classes of things that are frustrating problems on github, or anything else that uses flat hierarchies.

I think gitlab just gave up on trying to compete with github. They don't care about anything other than enterprise use cases, which are mostly on private instances.

I wrote a (public) uBlock filter list to hide this social media-like stuff. The “you might also like” genre exists to keep you on the platform and I have enough distractions.

Gitlab is a bit weird in that regard. Their standalone self-hosted use of it is great, but overall discovery is extremely poor on both self hosted and cloud editions.

They seem to have based the whole thing on the way Bitbucket works and completely ignored that being able to find a repo you've not been directly added to would be slightly useful.

If someone from gitlab is reading this and thinking "But you can find things" - you're blinded by the issue being an internal user. There might be ways of doing it, but its a convoluted mess and doesn't come close to github in that regard.

GitLab team member here.

In our 15.10 release (March 22), we added a new section called Explore that helps with content discovery and includes a tab for Trending projects that can be filtered by language. You can read out it in the release notes [0] or just go check it out [1].

0 - https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2023/03/22/gitlab-15-10-re...

1 - https://gitlab.com/explore/projects/trending

Yeah, I agree that some words could be choosed better, but overall it changed my mind over the use of GPL licenced code. Copilot and other ML tools should not use GPL trained models to create proprietary licenced code.

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