Gitlab, for all it's flaws fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects. It's more in line on what people involved in software dev and all the tasks around it have as a mental model and less of a "open source dev social network" like Github tried to be almost from the start and lately got Microsofted. An lets not even bring the CI / Github Actions topic..
Fundamentally, that's just git with a few common features like pull requests, account management and bug tracking.
Choosing one over the other is just a matter of details. How well it integrates with the corporate network, how pretty it looks, the options regarding CI/CD integration, overall popularity and community, etc... Last time I got to choose, I went with Gitea, because performance was good and it met my needs.
assigning reviewers is a major pain with gitlab. there have been multiple issues filed to support adding a group as a reviewer, only to have them closed by gitlab, saying thats not the ‘direction’ we’re going in. instead, you can do a /request_review @group in the description, but each person gets added individually so you can’t see which reviewers are in which group, you don’t know if you have the right groups to satisfy the codeowners files, etc. it’s such a mess.
Good and bad moments, honestly. GitLab would benefit massively if they went back and deleted all of the crap they added during their "feature checkbox craze" years.
Just looking at the left menu, "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops" and all this crap urgently needs to go and get out of peoples way.
And, dare I say it? There is a place for GitLab in a world where most development happens with coding agents. Its perfectly fine to be the version control & CI place. But they got stupid management (just like Atlassian or GitHub) that have convinced themselves they must be the orchestrator, the middleman, the gatekeeper to inference. They neither are nor will be that and if they go down the path of Copilot trying to ruin their product to make it happen, it will be the end.
Their current CEO was brought in to sell the company to private equity like he did with New Relic in his last job. Unfortunately for him, private equity is being selective in which SaaS companies they acquire right now with interest rates spiking and uncertainty over the future of SaaS as AI becomes more capable. Acquisition by an AI lab was probably their next best hope, but the labs seem to all be rolling their own developer platform instead. Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.
I don't know that the grass will remain green for very long anywhere in this current scenario.
GitHub is not having most of its outages because GitHub's engineers are using AI (although there might be a case or two of this). The primary driver of the outages is the fact that developers can move so much faster in their workflows. Every single user of these products is placing a heavier demand on the system. I don't think this ramping of demand will cease any time soon. I fully expect to receive an email any second now about how my 5,000 req/hr GH API quota will be cut in half before 2027.
I don't understand how GitLab would be immune from these forces, unless we were willing to reach for self-hosted & enterprise plans. Both of which GitHub offers.
Especially judging by whats happening in the gaming industry right now. Mass layoffs everywhere from once leading lights in the industry, now acquired by big business and having to succumb to broad budget cuts.
At the same time, more people are getting news from independent sources on social media and self publishing platforms. I can’t remember the last time I watched cable news.
It is a strong signal that open solutions should be available to swap into when the enshittification comes.
I have been unable to find an open equivilent of Roku, Apple TV, and Nvidia's Shield, but would be interested in sponsoring an open version via https://bounties.fulu.org/ that could be manufactured through CrowdSupply. An open design and code to run on the hardware avoids future commercial capture. One can then own their media system end to end, from storage, streaming (Jellyfin ecosystem), and hardware on a display.
Would also like a write-up. People assume it's just because of GitHub outages, but GitHub is slightly worse in every aspect, so for big projects and organisations it compounds to being quite messy to manage and operate.
GitLab is thought-out to support larger groups with more complex pipelines, and while it's got it's own set of quirks, it doesn't begin to compare, GitHub in contrast seems like a toy forge for toy projects.
Having used GitLab pipelines, I would definitely not describe it as well thought out. Their method of forcing all jobs/pipelines for a repo through one file controlled with a load of ‘if’ rules is a complete mess. Makes running multiple pipelines for one repo a huge PITA.
Compared to GitHub Actions or Jenkins its a pretty poor experience
And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).
I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines, so some people might have issues moving to it.
I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer to use it. So basically the opposite of Dagger.
The thread here is interesting, because I am in a rather different situation.
I made a game that I thought people might like. I'm trying to offer it to F-Droid and I am encountering pressure to create a GitLab account.
I have been finding it intensely ironic that a project like F-Droid is doing this. It seems like they have, themselves, built processes that have resulted in a form of lock-in that requires others to sign up to GitLab for interoperability.
(Forgive the stupid AI answer, but does this help?):
2. Submitting an App Without a GitLab Account
To get an app listed on F-Droid, a metadata file must be added to the official fdroiddata repository. While the standard workflow involves opening a Merge Request on GitLab, you still do not strictly need a GitLab account:
• Alternative Logins: The F-Droid GitLab instance allows you to sign in using your existing GitHub, Google, Bitbucket, or Salesforce accounts.
• Community Submission: If you do not want to interact with GitLab at all, you can post a request on the F-Droid Forum, and community contributors can create and submit the metadata file on your behalf.
-----
Apparently you don't need to actually create a gitlab account? Login with your github or whatever (I assume via oauth?)
The docs definitely don't look clear (on quick perusal), and maybe this info is outdated, but perhaps you can still push to gitlab without actually creating an account just need to make sure the metadata is correct?
Well that is another issue, It has been very difficult to follow their documentation. I read a bunch of pages that bounced me around links each containing a little information, but not in a manner I could turn into anything that I understood to be a clear path forward.
I asked on the #fdroid IRC channel without success. I only got as far as I did by asking an AI to decipher their documentation. I have posted on the forum, but it seems clear that this is a second class approach. It feels a little Kafkaesque to choose the non-GitLab path and have them recommend you use GitLab.
Sign in with an auth from another account is still creating an account, You may be able to use the other accounts to log in, but it still puts you through the sign up process asking a bunch of details.
Is it just me who is baffled, as to why is this surface level article getting soo much attention? a software company moved from one tool to another so what? There is no technical or non technical reasons mentioned in the article atleast. Why is this piquing interest in HN community. What am I missing here?
HN is weird. My submission yesterday "Roku SceneGraph 2.0 SDK: Migrating to TypeScript" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212170> (which also involves the not-inconsequential news that the new SDK is open source) is at least 10x more interesting but got almost no attention.
Microsoft has abandoned Azure Devops so we've had to move to Github for any 'new' (read AI) features.
Github is so bad I don't even know where to start.
It's fine for small personal projects and the odd project with a few collaborators.
But it's just not built for managing large software projects. Even the PR process is awful compared to Azure Devops (and Azure Devops was, in my opinion, ok bordering on good). Diffs are somehow worse than any tool I've ever used.
I am now questioning what Microsoft has been doing all these years they've owned it.
My work GitHub account got suspended because Claude ran a bunch of gh commands in parallel. (Btw why not rate limit if it’s a problem?) For days now they won’t respond to my support ticket. Guess I just don’t get to have a job anymore because GitHub doesn’t like me? Burned a lifetime worth of goodwill from me this week.
It is so mid compared to the source control ecosystem I was exposed to at Meta. It really opened my eyes to how little innovation there has been in the public space and around git pretty much since its inception.
GitHub is such a mess. They seem to be doing everything and nothing. GitLab is 100x better, in terms of DX. While I still have a soft spot for GH, its frustrating to use it when GL exists.
In general, the foundations upon which it was built.
In specific, off the top of my head:
- you can't group repos
- CI/CD is far behind what GitLab offers
- Review apps (though I think now you can do this on GH with other tools)
- Can't mark PRs as drafts by default in GH
- better metric tracking, easier to see a "snapshot" of where something is at on GitLab
Tbf, GH may have closed some gaps over the years but when I was bouncing between the two GH always felt a lot more rigid and further behind than GL. It did have fantastic support for open source though, and has a few unique and fun things like the `io` site stuff. Overall though if I could choose which to work in for serious projects I'll always choose GL.
I moved my projects over to GitLab about a year ago.
GitLab's model is different - at least it was when I moved over to it. They charged for public repositories and gave you a free private ones as a sampler for trying out the platform. That approach is far less prone to getting overrun by millions of slopositories.
GitLab never tried to be the social media of software development. Theirs is a much simpler, classical model - one of the reasons I switched to them: you pay them money, they provide you services for that money.
They recently added more limits which should prevent a lot of AI abuse (which GitHub should have added a year ago). They also require a credit card now, and require payment immediately for exceeding storage limit or more than 5 people on a free/personal team.
> GitLab will eventually just get overran with 24/7 agents spewing from their AI Slop Cannons
That's fine. GitLab offers self-hosted solutions where companies run the service in their own infrastructure and limit who has access to it. The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.
That isn't true. Self hosted Github exists, and has for years now. From what I hear (from a friend who had to administer his company's instance) it's not a good product by any means, but it does exist.
I always found it wierd that people flocked to github. The app sucks, if I have to use it for work it infuriates me at nearly every turn with its sad excuse for UI. People like free sh*.
As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.
While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.
The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.
You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
> mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
A software project either is or isn't open source. Gitlab CE is source-available (here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) with an MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license.
Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.
Good. I want everyone to do this. I want to see the downfall of Microsoft. Time and again they've proved that anything they touch can't be trusted nor reliable. I am tired of this. They even bully their users - on Mac OS, GitHub desktop doesn't respect the word "no". It installs all kinds of helpers and acts like borderline spyware. Someone created an issue about it on Github and the MS employees told them to fuck off in corporate[1]
I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.
Thanks for a good laugh, FOSS in 2026 is nothing without the money of big corporations, including Microsoft.
Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.
Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.
So, the solution is just "suck it up and deal with it"? We pay good money to Microsoft for some of our client orgs and defending this level of piss poor reliability is just cope in the name of support for FOSS. I don't see why this should be accepted. This is mainly because their shitstorm that's Azure.
I'm hosting Forgejo for my homelab and couldn't be happier. I have everything running in containers with dind for CI/CD. Most of my workflows just worked with minimal changes. YMMV and this is far from an enterprises' needs but it's working great so far for my needs.
Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.
>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.
It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.
> making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job.
Not if you didn't vide code your architecture. I have a 7 year box running without a single incident (touchwood) because 7 years ago we didn't have vibe coding and I used a compiled language. To use PHP for anything serious in 2026 is just insane, let's be honest.
I think so, but, only if you differentiate in the privacy angle (think Proton vs GMail) and this is similar to how most enterprise GIT offerings work, too. The risk is GitHub offering to existing orgs who are already on Office 365 a self-hosted version (I think they already do). So, this business model will fail in the SWOT analysis itself. Still, there might be some looking to exit MS office ecosystem, it might make more sense for them.
No. You'd be competing with multiple mature cloud services plus Github Enterprise Cloud/self-hosted plus multiple open source options.
I don't need or want a dedicated support engineer for my VCS, I need it to integrate with all the bullshit products I already have, tick off the compliance and governance checkboxes for the suits, give me controls so SWEs do less dumb shit and above all, not be something I have to think about except at contract renewal time.
I'm just not going to trust a rando to run all that for me and get it right, especially not at that price point.
Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.
Gitlab, for all it's flaws fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects. It's more in line on what people involved in software dev and all the tasks around it have as a mental model and less of a "open source dev social network" like Github tried to be almost from the start and lately got Microsofted. An lets not even bring the CI / Github Actions topic..
> fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects
How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.
Fundamentally, that's just git with a few common features like pull requests, account management and bug tracking.
Choosing one over the other is just a matter of details. How well it integrates with the corporate network, how pretty it looks, the options regarding CI/CD integration, overall popularity and community, etc... Last time I got to choose, I went with Gitea, because performance was good and it met my needs.
I found it much easier to organize repos hierarchically with GitLab. Permissions also seemed easier to setup.
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Yeah I agree. There are only very minor differences.
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assigning reviewers is a major pain with gitlab. there have been multiple issues filed to support adding a group as a reviewer, only to have them closed by gitlab, saying thats not the ‘direction’ we’re going in. instead, you can do a /request_review @group in the description, but each person gets added individually so you can’t see which reviewers are in which group, you don’t know if you have the right groups to satisfy the codeowners files, etc. it’s such a mess.
Is Gitlab Open Source or one of those weird "code available" projects? Can we make a PR?
Good and bad moments, honestly. GitLab would benefit massively if they went back and deleted all of the crap they added during their "feature checkbox craze" years. Just looking at the left menu, "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops" and all this crap urgently needs to go and get out of peoples way.
And, dare I say it? There is a place for GitLab in a world where most development happens with coding agents. Its perfectly fine to be the version control & CI place. But they got stupid management (just like Atlassian or GitHub) that have convinced themselves they must be the orchestrator, the middleman, the gatekeeper to inference. They neither are nor will be that and if they go down the path of Copilot trying to ruin their product to make it happen, it will be the end.
> "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops"
Deploy contains the released versions and packages.
Operate is for Infrastructure as Code.
Analyze are project and CI statistics.
I doubt you want to remove any of them, they are quite needed functionality.
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Gitlab should be a private company
Their current CEO was brought in to sell the company to private equity like he did with New Relic in his last job. Unfortunately for him, private equity is being selective in which SaaS companies they acquire right now with interest rates spiking and uncertainty over the future of SaaS as AI becomes more capable. Acquisition by an AI lab was probably their next best hope, but the labs seem to all be rolling their own developer platform instead. Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.
(Assuming the move was due to the recent outages)
I don't know that the grass will remain green for very long anywhere in this current scenario.
GitHub is not having most of its outages because GitHub's engineers are using AI (although there might be a case or two of this). The primary driver of the outages is the fact that developers can move so much faster in their workflows. Every single user of these products is placing a heavier demand on the system. I don't think this ramping of demand will cease any time soon. I fully expect to receive an email any second now about how my 5,000 req/hr GH API quota will be cut in half before 2027.
I don't understand how GitLab would be immune from these forces, unless we were willing to reach for self-hosted & enterprise plans. Both of which GitHub offers.
Apparently they have 14x more code than the same month last year in github.
I'm sure most of it is garbage.
Worth mentioning that Roku is being acquired by Fox so in the virtue battle with Microsoft neither are clean
What virtue battle?
Microsoft previously owned a left leaning news network MSNBC (now MSNOW) in contrast to Fox’s right wing news networks.
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This is an important point. You have a giant conglomerate with a constant growth of new conflicts for their customers.
it seems like all the media companies are being bought up by a select few people
does not portend good things for the future
There's no way the future is good, near term or long term. Not unless you're a part of that specific class.
Especially judging by whats happening in the gaming industry right now. Mass layoffs everywhere from once leading lights in the industry, now acquired by big business and having to succumb to broad budget cuts.
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At the same time, more people are getting news from independent sources on social media and self publishing platforms. I can’t remember the last time I watched cable news.
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for the future? this has already been happening for years and is a major reason we're in the predicament we're in
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Roku isn't a media company. They make hardware and license software.
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It is a strong signal that open solutions should be available to swap into when the enshittification comes.
I have been unable to find an open equivilent of Roku, Apple TV, and Nvidia's Shield, but would be interested in sponsoring an open version via https://bounties.fulu.org/ that could be manufactured through CrowdSupply. An open design and code to run on the hardware avoids future commercial capture. One can then own their media system end to end, from storage, streaming (Jellyfin ecosystem), and hardware on a display.
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For one that deal hasn't closed and secondly not sure what the connection is between Roku leaving Github and FOX. Please expand on relevance.
“virtue battle”! like it
I wish they would spill some tea and articulate why they moved.
Would also like a write-up. People assume it's just because of GitHub outages, but GitHub is slightly worse in every aspect, so for big projects and organisations it compounds to being quite messy to manage and operate.
GitLab is thought-out to support larger groups with more complex pipelines, and while it's got it's own set of quirks, it doesn't begin to compare, GitHub in contrast seems like a toy forge for toy projects.
Having used GitLab pipelines, I would definitely not describe it as well thought out. Their method of forcing all jobs/pipelines for a repo through one file controlled with a load of ‘if’ rules is a complete mess. Makes running multiple pipelines for one repo a huge PITA. Compared to GitHub Actions or Jenkins its a pretty poor experience
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why? like having a dozen outages in the last couple months isn't a good enough reason why?
GitLab is just as bad, just not as big so doesn't get the coverage. https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...
And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).
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No horse in this race but GitLab has been down a few times recently too.
Considering the sheer volume GitHub received lately I wouldn’t be surprised if GitLab would experience similar issues unless self hosted.
Or what do you think?
Or Microsoft/OpenAI (and others) just blatantly scraping all your codebases and violating thousands of OSS licneses?
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Roku uses Gitlab internally so could just be a standardization thing.
Moving changes back and forth between gitlab and github is a pain. Could indeed be as simple as standardization and reducing development pains.
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Probably the lack of transparency regarding AI and AI accounts. They don't require any declaration..
I saw a big write up on using Dagger for CI no matter your git host and I was curious if there were any real benefits?
I like Dagger but it doesn't scale very well for larger workloads. Excellent for small/medium projects, though.
I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines, so some people might have issues moving to it.
I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer to use it. So basically the opposite of Dagger.
Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers
- Container based workflows are the same in CI and locally (you can run containers too), they become one-liners
- Remote caching out of the box without extra steps
- Multiple language SDKs, unlocks the DAG in BuildKit and containers, real reuse
- Obfuscates secrets from your logs and agents. I've built an agent environment on Dagger, which also includes forking and time travel)
tl;dr - Dagger gives you SDK access to BuildKit and container based DAGs for building or anything else.
v1-beta just released yesterday: https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-10-beta/
---
edit: they are replacing BuildKit (for good reasons) and that is already out https://dagger.io/changelog/theseus/
Have you written or posted publicly about your agent environment? It sounds really interesting.
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Did this back in ~2021 for my own repos :D https://prologic.blog/posts/2021-07-11-why-i-no-longer-trust...
The thread here is interesting, because I am in a rather different situation.
I made a game that I thought people might like. I'm trying to offer it to F-Droid and I am encountering pressure to create a GitLab account.
I have been finding it intensely ironic that a project like F-Droid is doing this. It seems like they have, themselves, built processes that have resulted in a form of lock-in that requires others to sign up to GitLab for interoperability.
(Forgive the stupid AI answer, but does this help?):
2. Submitting an App Without a GitLab Account
To get an app listed on F-Droid, a metadata file must be added to the official fdroiddata repository. While the standard workflow involves opening a Merge Request on GitLab, you still do not strictly need a GitLab account: • Alternative Logins: The F-Droid GitLab instance allows you to sign in using your existing GitHub, Google, Bitbucket, or Salesforce accounts. • Community Submission: If you do not want to interact with GitLab at all, you can post a request on the F-Droid Forum, and community contributors can create and submit the metadata file on your behalf.
----- Apparently you don't need to actually create a gitlab account? Login with your github or whatever (I assume via oauth?)
The docs definitely don't look clear (on quick perusal), and maybe this info is outdated, but perhaps you can still push to gitlab without actually creating an account just need to make sure the metadata is correct?
Well that is another issue, It has been very difficult to follow their documentation. I read a bunch of pages that bounced me around links each containing a little information, but not in a manner I could turn into anything that I understood to be a clear path forward.
I asked on the #fdroid IRC channel without success. I only got as far as I did by asking an AI to decipher their documentation. I have posted on the forum, but it seems clear that this is a second class approach. It feels a little Kafkaesque to choose the non-GitLab path and have them recommend you use GitLab.
Sign in with an auth from another account is still creating an account, You may be able to use the other accounts to log in, but it still puts you through the sign up process asking a bunch of details.
If Roku has moved then I guess it is game over.
Is it just me who is baffled, as to why is this surface level article getting soo much attention? a software company moved from one tool to another so what? There is no technical or non technical reasons mentioned in the article atleast. Why is this piquing interest in HN community. What am I missing here?
HN is weird. My submission yesterday "Roku SceneGraph 2.0 SDK: Migrating to TypeScript" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212170> (which also involves the not-inconsequential news that the new SDK is open source) is at least 10x more interesting but got almost no attention.
Every thread relating to Github seems overwhelmingly negative towards Github.
Even as an appreciator of multiple Git forges... Github seems good?
Microsoft has abandoned Azure Devops so we've had to move to Github for any 'new' (read AI) features.
Github is so bad I don't even know where to start. It's fine for small personal projects and the odd project with a few collaborators. But it's just not built for managing large software projects. Even the PR process is awful compared to Azure Devops (and Azure Devops was, in my opinion, ok bordering on good). Diffs are somehow worse than any tool I've ever used.
I am now questioning what Microsoft has been doing all these years they've owned it.
My work GitHub account got suspended because Claude ran a bunch of gh commands in parallel. (Btw why not rate limit if it’s a problem?) For days now they won’t respond to my support ticket. Guess I just don’t get to have a job anymore because GitHub doesn’t like me? Burned a lifetime worth of goodwill from me this week.
It is so mid compared to the source control ecosystem I was exposed to at Meta. It really opened my eyes to how little innovation there has been in the public space and around git pretty much since its inception.
Forges catering to public should follow standards. This limits your ability to get creative. Git client has become the defacto standard.
gitlab is extremely bad compared to meta as well.
They have a lot of downtime. I use github actions and it’s down multiple times each week.
I like github, but it’s getting kind of nuts.
Why is this important news?
A major software project is changing from one major software tool to another major software tool. How is it not important? Or at least notable for HN?
What if it had moved from Gitlab to Github?
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GitHub is such a mess. They seem to be doing everything and nothing. GitLab is 100x better, in terms of DX. While I still have a soft spot for GH, its frustrating to use it when GL exists.
Downtime aside, what do prefer about GitLab?
In general, the foundations upon which it was built.
In specific, off the top of my head:
- you can't group repos
- CI/CD is far behind what GitLab offers
- Review apps (though I think now you can do this on GH with other tools)
- Can't mark PRs as drafts by default in GH
- better metric tracking, easier to see a "snapshot" of where something is at on GitLab
Tbf, GH may have closed some gaps over the years but when I was bouncing between the two GH always felt a lot more rigid and further behind than GL. It did have fantastic support for open source though, and has a few unique and fun things like the `io` site stuff. Overall though if I could choose which to work in for serious projects I'll always choose GL.
GitLab has a top of the class CICD system that is leaps and bounds over GitHub Actions. That alone makes it worth using GitLab.
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Move to Game of Trees and the integrated gotwebd, move on, have a happy life.
We did the same, quit happy
It’s frustrating that now we’re back to repo fragmentation and figuring out where and how to contribute has regressed 20 years
> figuring out where and how to contribute has regressed 20 years
What?
Step 1: go to project's manpage/readme or website.
Step 2: find the URL of their software forge (git/svn/hg site).
Step 3: clone and contribute using that website.
That process has been largely the same for a lot more than 20 years. Most people were not using GitHub as a discovery/random-repo-browsing system.
gitlab > github
Why? Any specific reasons?
Do you have some time?
>> Why? Any specific reasons?
> Do you have some time?
Okay, I laughed.
PR > MR
Roku has developer repositories?
GitLab will eventually just get overran with 24/7 agents spewing from their AI Slop Cannons
I moved my projects over to GitLab about a year ago.
GitLab's model is different - at least it was when I moved over to it. They charged for public repositories and gave you a free private ones as a sampler for trying out the platform. That approach is far less prone to getting overrun by millions of slopositories.
GitLab never tried to be the social media of software development. Theirs is a much simpler, classical model - one of the reasons I switched to them: you pay them money, they provide you services for that money.
It already is. (source: we use it as our primary forge)
They recently added more limits which should prevent a lot of AI abuse (which GitHub should have added a year ago). They also require a credit card now, and require payment immediately for exceeding storage limit or more than 5 people on a free/personal team.
> GitLab will eventually just get overran with 24/7 agents spewing from their AI Slop Cannons
That's fine. GitLab offers self-hosted solutions where companies run the service in their own infrastructure and limit who has access to it. The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.
Wouldn't that be Github enterprise? It's been around since 2012 IIRC.
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> The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.
That isn't true. Self hosted Github exists, and has for years now. From what I hear (from a friend who had to administer his company's instance) it's not a good product by any means, but it does exist.
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The readme.md still says welcome to their GitHub repository :D
Fixed https://gitlab.com/rokudev/dev-doc/-/merge_requests/6
I always found it wierd that people flocked to github. The app sucks, if I have to use it for work it infuriates me at nearly every turn with its sad excuse for UI. People like free sh*.
As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.
While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.
The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.
> I always found it weird that people flocked to github.
Same reason we ended up with git. Their predecessors were significantly worse, and then they had enough momentum to keep going.
Well you're a developer. Why don't you make something better instead of complaining?
> I always found (...)
You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
> mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
Self-hosted free software:
Gerrit <https://www.gerritcodereview.com> Phorge <https://we.phorge.it>
SaaSsy:
Codeberg <https://codeberg.org> SourceHut <https://sr.ht/>
There are a lot more, of course, these are just the ones I have experience with.
There are none. This industry is a joke on all of us.
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So they replaced a tool from an evil corporation by another one disguised as an open source project.
A software project either is or isn't open source. Gitlab CE is source-available (here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) with an MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license.
Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.
This logic baffles me. This would mean no one gets any work done and we go in a perennial cycle of victimhood
Good. I want everyone to do this. I want to see the downfall of Microsoft. Time and again they've proved that anything they touch can't be trusted nor reliable. I am tired of this. They even bully their users - on Mac OS, GitHub desktop doesn't respect the word "no". It installs all kinds of helpers and acts like borderline spyware. Someone created an issue about it on Github and the MS employees told them to fuck off in corporate[1]
I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.
[1] https://github.com/creativefoundrysg/desktop#an-open-letter-...
Thanks for a good laugh, FOSS in 2026 is nothing without the money of big corporations, including Microsoft.
Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.
Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.
So, the solution is just "suck it up and deal with it"? We pay good money to Microsoft for some of our client orgs and defending this level of piss poor reliability is just cope in the name of support for FOSS. I don't see why this should be accepted. This is mainly because their shitstorm that's Azure.
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I'm hosting Forgejo for my homelab and couldn't be happier. I have everything running in containers with dind for CI/CD. Most of my workflows just worked with minimal changes. YMMV and this is far from an enterprises' needs but it's working great so far for my needs.
My friend group also moved to self hosted forgejo. Couldn’t be happier and then I don’t have LLMs training on my code.
Thank you, just looking at it. Looks awesome so far. Thanks so much!
>Good. I want everyone to do this
Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.
>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.
It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.
> making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job.
Not if you didn't vide code your architecture. I have a 7 year box running without a single incident (touchwood) because 7 years ago we didn't have vibe coding and I used a compiled language. To use PHP for anything serious in 2026 is just insane, let's be honest.
Running an up to date self hosted Gitea server takes like 5 minutes a week.
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As an idea, do you think an enterprise only Git host would work.
Say annual contracts start at 100k minimum and everyone gets a dedicated support engineer.
You get your own rack. None of this degraded shared capability nonsense.
Does that seem like a solid business ?
I think so, but, only if you differentiate in the privacy angle (think Proton vs GMail) and this is similar to how most enterprise GIT offerings work, too. The risk is GitHub offering to existing orgs who are already on Office 365 a self-hosted version (I think they already do). So, this business model will fail in the SWOT analysis itself. Still, there might be some looking to exit MS office ecosystem, it might make more sense for them.
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No. You'd be competing with multiple mature cloud services plus Github Enterprise Cloud/self-hosted plus multiple open source options.
I don't need or want a dedicated support engineer for my VCS, I need it to integrate with all the bullshit products I already have, tick off the compliance and governance checkboxes for the suits, give me controls so SWEs do less dumb shit and above all, not be something I have to think about except at contract renewal time.
I'm just not going to trust a rando to run all that for me and get it right, especially not at that price point.
Is that Bitbucket?
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Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.
Just use Sublime Merge, it's probably the best GUI for Git there is.
GitKraken has been good in my experience with it for many years
Here try one of the others:
https://git-scm.com/tools/guis
A devops friend of mine said GitHub turned into a hot mess.
Because of unreviewed AI code at GitHub services?
Or maybe because the use of GitHub has skyrocketed?
Because MS is at helm