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.
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.