Comment by c-hendricks 3 days ago
When I self hosted gitlab I never found the maintenance to be that bad, just change a version in a compose.yml, sometimes having to jump between blessed versions if I've missed a few back to back.
Like others, I've switch to Gitea, but whenever I do visit gitlab I can't help but think the design / UX is so much nicer.
For instance I just got tripped trying to sign out of my gitea instance since the mobile design has two identical looking avatar + username blocks on top of each other, one being the org switcher the other being a menu (with no indicator) with the sign out button.
I went to a project page, and it auto focused the search input (???), causing a zoom in on mobile.
I just prefer the design / look + feel of gitlab more than gitea/forejo. It's not really a hot take, gitlab has been around a lot longer and has much more support.
That was my take too. It is a big project with a lot of functionality. But, I never needed all of that functionality, so it just seemed bloated to me. I switched over to Gitea for self-hosted code repositories (non-public repos behind a firewall) a while back and haven't had any issues thus far.
My usual impression of GitLab is that it has too many functions I don't ever use, so the things I actually do want (code, issues, PRs, user permissions) are needlessly hidden. What's your workflow that you find GitLab's UX to be nicer than Gitea's?