I personally like Blender’s Gitea theme better than the rest but I guess that’s subjective. In dark mode I do not like the low contrast Codeberg theme or the default Forgejo theme, but all of the instances custom themes look great.
As far as Git forges go in general though.. tangled is very pretty https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core I think more power user oriented software should be comfortable with compact interfaces
That Blender Gitea theme is really nice! I wonder why exactly it's so much easier on the eyes? In a lot of ways all of these are "just Github" with minor changes, so the one that is actually better really stands out.
It's fascinating how fast the Forgejo I host at my university's laboratory loads from my home network. Every page load is <100ms. I think it goes to show how much bloat we don't realise exists in modern webapps.
Ideally those forgejos would safe enough to be on the public internet (and using a federation protocol like activitypub) so we don't have to go through a centralized service such as github and not locked behind private networks (such as tailscale nets)
It's so unfortunate that Gitlab is a complete mess, that GitHub has no real competition now. I can only think that few months to a year from now there will be _something_ that works on an enterprise scale.
Have you forgotten about Azure Dev Ops aka Visual Studio Team System aka Team Foundation Server*?
Yes, it's still Microsoft, but they've forgotten about it, so it runs entirely adequately and is actually a surprisingly okay github replacement. It does nothing special, but it does do everything, just in a way you often would rather it wouldn't. It doesn't have the flexibility of JIRA for the ticketing, and the deployment machinery doesn't have the fanciness ( and vendor threat ) of chaining github actions, but it does handle both.
I haven't used gitlab, so I'm curious to hear what makes it a "complete mess" too.
* Microsoft's headless chicken naming strategy in full force, it's a miracle they haven't yet renamed and rebranded it to align with copilot yet.
How is it painful to use GitLab? Curious, as a user of both, I find them both nice. I like GitLab CI/CD more than I do GHA, but that's personal preference/bias more than anything objective.
Gitlab CI has some tech debt from accumulating geological layers of different ways to do things, but overall it's pretty good, it scales to more complicated setups, and it's not too painful.
Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum. Put all your CI logic in a script that you can test locally, and just have GHA run your script. Even that is painful. And, somehow, impossible to make secure without having spent 5,000 hours reading all the previous ways people got pwn'd by Github Action's horrendous security model.
My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI. It's always exactly in the third place I look. Otherwise Gitlab has been good. Even self-hosted works pretty well.
if you just want somewhere to stick a code repo and build a release every so often — dont use gitlab, you will not enjoy it.
> My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI.
i still get lost too after several years daily driving gitlab. this is the Ops centric thing. they provide a lot of options. lots of options is good for Ops.
> Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum
yeah, i’m an ops guy, so the maintaining custom actions stuff on github is horrible for me vs click a button and move on with my day — once i find the button that is! xD
Gitlab is pretty decent. Honestly I would say there's not much between GitHub and Gitlab. Gitlab's CI is more powerful than GitHub's IMO, but the UX is a bit worse. But it's really marginal.
They're both slow and have tons of long-standing missing features. But they're ok. I'd definitely rather use Gitea/Gogs/Forgejo, and maybe Tangled if it supported normal setups (e.g. private repos).
As a daily GitLab user, I'd say that would be the main criticism I could levy at it as well. It does feel like there are a number of "and the kitchen sink" type features that are just there to check a box in a RFP or something.
That said, are the majority of people actually even _using_ those features? For us we're essentially just using GitLab for git, merge requests, and CI pipelines. A couple places we use the static page hosting. (First thing I do whenever I create a new repository is go into the settings and just uncheck _all_ the boxes.)
All of that core functionality works really well and is more than polished enough from my point of view.
Self-hosting forgejo under tailscale + mirroring public repos through GitHub
Has worked wonders for me :)
Forgejo is fantastic. I do think it could use a fresh coat of paint from a designer but it’s otherwise really good.
Gitea (what Forgejo forked from) recently stole the sidebar on repos from GitHub and I think that would be great for Forgejo to steal too…
Forgejo themed by Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo (the codeberg theme is extremely low contrast)
Forgejo default: https://v15.next.forgejo.org/pparaxan/quark
Forgejo themed by Lix: https://git.lix.systems/lix-project/lix
Gitea: https://gitea.com/gitea/awesome-gitea
Gitea themed by Blender: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender
I personally like Blender’s Gitea theme better than the rest but I guess that’s subjective. In dark mode I do not like the low contrast Codeberg theme or the default Forgejo theme, but all of the instances custom themes look great.
As far as Git forges go in general though.. tangled is very pretty https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core I think more power user oriented software should be comfortable with compact interfaces
That Blender Gitea theme is really nice! I wonder why exactly it's so much easier on the eyes? In a lot of ways all of these are "just Github" with minor changes, so the one that is actually better really stands out.
It's fascinating how fast the Forgejo I host at my university's laboratory loads from my home network. Every page load is <100ms. I think it goes to show how much bloat we don't realise exists in modern webapps.
GitHub used to be like that before they rebuilt everything in React.
No, they didn’t rebuilt everything in React and current sluggishness of page loads is not related to React.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47940456
Ideally those forgejos would safe enough to be on the public internet (and using a federation protocol like activitypub) so we don't have to go through a centralized service such as github and not locked behind private networks (such as tailscale nets)
It's so unfortunate that Gitlab is a complete mess, that GitHub has no real competition now. I can only think that few months to a year from now there will be _something_ that works on an enterprise scale.
Have you forgotten about Azure Dev Ops aka Visual Studio Team System aka Team Foundation Server*?
Yes, it's still Microsoft, but they've forgotten about it, so it runs entirely adequately and is actually a surprisingly okay github replacement. It does nothing special, but it does do everything, just in a way you often would rather it wouldn't. It doesn't have the flexibility of JIRA for the ticketing, and the deployment machinery doesn't have the fanciness ( and vendor threat ) of chaining github actions, but it does handle both.
I haven't used gitlab, so I'm curious to hear what makes it a "complete mess" too.
* Microsoft's headless chicken naming strategy in full force, it's a miracle they haven't yet renamed and rebranded it to align with copilot yet.
One does not mention TFS in polite company
Only alternative outside of GitHub and GitLab I've used was Bitbucket, and it was worse - but this was time when GitHub was good.
There are plenty of open source forges with a better UX.
Don't forget CodePlex!
I'd consider self-hosting GitHub Enterprise before putting my team through the pain of Gitlab.
How is it painful to use GitLab? Curious, as a user of both, I find them both nice. I like GitLab CI/CD more than I do GHA, but that's personal preference/bias more than anything objective.
Gitlab CI has some tech debt from accumulating geological layers of different ways to do things, but overall it's pretty good, it scales to more complicated setups, and it's not too painful.
Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum. Put all your CI logic in a script that you can test locally, and just have GHA run your script. Even that is painful. And, somehow, impossible to make secure without having spent 5,000 hours reading all the previous ways people got pwn'd by Github Action's horrendous security model.
My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI. It's always exactly in the third place I look. Otherwise Gitlab has been good. Even self-hosted works pretty well.
expanding on the parent a little
* GiLab — Ops centric
* GitHub — Developer centric
if you just want somewhere to stick a code repo and build a release every so often — dont use gitlab, you will not enjoy it.
> My main problem with Gitlab is that after years I still can't find what I'm looking for in the UI.
i still get lost too after several years daily driving gitlab. this is the Ops centric thing. they provide a lot of options. lots of options is good for Ops.
> Now the best way to use GHA is to do the bare minimum
yeah, i’m an ops guy, so the maintaining custom actions stuff on github is horrible for me vs click a button and move on with my day — once i find the button that is! xD
Gitlab is pretty decent. Honestly I would say there's not much between GitHub and Gitlab. Gitlab's CI is more powerful than GitHub's IMO, but the UX is a bit worse. But it's really marginal.
They're both slow and have tons of long-standing missing features. But they're ok. I'd definitely rather use Gitea/Gogs/Forgejo, and maybe Tangled if it supported normal setups (e.g. private repos).
Everything about their UI/UX screams of doing the bare minimum to check off a box on a feature list. It reminds me of Jira.
As a daily GitLab user, I'd say that would be the main criticism I could levy at it as well. It does feel like there are a number of "and the kitchen sink" type features that are just there to check a box in a RFP or something.
That said, are the majority of people actually even _using_ those features? For us we're essentially just using GitLab for git, merge requests, and CI pipelines. A couple places we use the static page hosting. (First thing I do whenever I create a new repository is go into the settings and just uncheck _all_ the boxes.)
All of that core functionality works really well and is more than polished enough from my point of view.