Gitlab’s community edition is a frustrating experience. We created our private instance in 2012 or so, when Gitlab was bot looking for world domination and the

Gitlab’s community edition is a frustrating experience. We created our private instance in 2012 or so, when Gitlab was bot looking for world domination and the entire project was promised to be open source forever, and they were gonna make money off the hosted service and support contracts. Well, then the VC money hit and now navigating through basic features can be a confusing mess. So after many years they released merge request reviews to the community edition. This would be great, except you don’t get access to enforcement. So the approval is a purely decorative feature (that would be as easily achieved earlier by simply having any approved hit the button). To be able to develop any sort of collaborative project you have to install the proprietary version and at that point you’re hardly better off than Github except you’re paying more for less (although I’m not exactly sure of Github’s on prem pricing but the hosted Github is way more bang for the buck than either the hosted or on prem Gitlab). Gitlab also recommends installing the Proprietary edition and using the “free” tier over the community edition so you can upgrade to the paid features, which you cannot on the community edition. So if you don’t want to be blocked in the future you’re installing the proprietary version anyways. And going with Gitlab you’re also rewarding the scammy bait and switch they pulled some years ago (I’m not sure when this changed because I stopped working with the company I setu it up at, but you can see the archive.org look at their website for the different focus earlier, and the off website messaging was also very different).