We recommend Codeberg/Forgejo now since it is better in every way, and Gitlab went corpo.

I've used self-hosted GitLab a bunch at work, it's pretty good there still. In my opinion GitLab CI is also a solid offering, especially for the folks coming from something like Jenkins, doubly so when combined with Docker executors and mostly working with containers.

I used to run a GitLab instance for my own needs, however keeping up with the updates (especially across major versions) proved to be a bit too much and it was quite resource hungry.

My personal stack right now is Gitea + Drone CI + Nexus, though I might move over to Woodpecker CI in the future and also maybe look for alternatives to Nexus (it's also quite heavyweight and annoying to admin).

Having tried gitlab, it's a very poor product almost unmaintainable as a self hosted option. Reminds me of Eclipse IDE - crammed with every other unnecessary feature/plugin and the basic features are either very slow or buggy.

At this point Gitlab is just there because being even a small X% of a huge million/billion dollar market is good enough as a company even if the product is almost unusable.

Not just HN, Gitlab has perhaps changed as well.

I wouldn't touch Gitlab at this point. I didn't change. They did.