Any important feature from Gitlab you feel is missing? I personally think Gitlab has way more features than I need but maybe there are some important ones I would miss.
I deal with GitLab a lot. Both the official instance and third party instances.
It drives me crazy how slow it is. A lot of operations take minutes. Eg: I push commits to a branch and open an MR. During 2-3 minutes, the MR will indicate that no changes were found. When I push new changes, it can also take minutes or update, so I can’t quickly check that it all looks correct.
The latest release changed their issues UI, so when you try to open an issue, it’s opened on a floating panel on the right 30% of the screen. I’ve no idea what exotic use case this addresses, but when I click a link, just open it. The browser does it find. No need to reinvent navigation like this. Now to open an issue, I need to wait for this slow floating UI to load before I can _actually_ navigate to the page. Which will also be extremely slow.
Don’t even get me started on the UI. Buttons are hidden all over the place. Obvious links are behind obscure abstract menus. At this point, I remember where all the basic stuff is, but I can understand why newcomers struggle so much.
Hosting GitLab is also really resource intensive. For a small team of 2-3 people, I don’t think you can get away with “just” 8GB of ram.
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I do have to admit, GitLab CI is pretty good, assuming that you’re fine with just Docker support and don’t need to support BSD or some exotic platforms.
I use git pretty basically, just as a revision system where the hosted version has some nice-to-haves on top like rendering markdown, permalinking bits of code to people, and being able to open tickets and contribute code. Gitea/Forgejo/Codeberg does all of that and I haven't run into any missing features. It's also a lot easier to navigate than GitLab, but I'll admit that's probably just a matter of me not being used to it
Having self-hosted Gitea after considering GitLab, I can also say that the resource consumption of Gitea is a tiny fraction of that of GitLab's. I don't get the impression that their employees care about self hosters beyond as a gateway for enterprise sysadmins to get it running quickly before doing some big installation
A tough question as everyone's needs are different; I might recommend you create an account on https://codeberg.org as it's the largest, most popular instance of Forgejo running with many FOSS projects hosted there.
Codeberg devs have to disable some features (pull mirrors e.g., only push is allowed to prevent abuse) and they use some custom code (abuse mitigation - spam, etc.) but in general you're getting the latest Foregjo experience "test drive" which only gets better when self hosting when you can use all the features.
Gods, for some reason GitLab consumes 5-10% of a CPU at all times. I spent weeks trying to get it to calm down to reduce our AWS spend. Absolutely no changes no matter what I tried. On my 2013 Xeon server at home it's even worse.
GitLab is great, I really do enjoy working with it. I hate running it.
Yeah, I love gitlab as a user - but as an admin, the performance feels like something out the 90s. I had to use the gitlab-rails REPL console for something a couple of weeks ago. Even on a server with tons of headroom, it took *10 minutes* to start up?
Depends on your needs. Last time I checked, Gitlab wanted money for e.g. assigning multiple PR reviewers, which is available in gitea/forgejo.
The real issue with gitea/forgejo compared to Gitlab is their terrible CI, which is (to some approximation) a clone of GitHub Actions, also a dumpster fire for those of us proficient with/preferring the UNIX command line. You'll probably need a separate CI runner, like Woodpecker or Drone.
CI is one area that it's "lacking." I quote that because, honestly, all the bells and whistles in these CI yamls are starting to hurt. Woodpecker[1] (what forgejo uses) is strikingly simple.
