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GitLab is starting to become difficult to use due to the amount of features being introduced. It was simple but now it just looks and feels complex. Personal pe

GitLab is starting to become difficult to use due to the amount of features being introduced. It was simple but now it just looks and feels complex. Personal perspective, of course.

iKevinShah 5y ago
Not using it for enterprise (I am not the one who decides) but I started with Gitlab CE for my personal use (running in a docker container), it was exactly as you put it. It felt complex. Moved to Gitea and I am surprised by how fast git doing just git can be (on my limited hardware)
carlosf 5y ago
I'm a paying customer and I agree. Meanwhile many core features are still unpolished e.g.: running your own runners sucks and you can't test CI/CD locally.
- jamietanna 5y ago
  What do you mean re not testing locally? I've had good success with hosting a runner on my local machine and using it to run the jobs
- deastman 5y ago
  Hi Carlos, Darren here, PM for runner. Can you provide a bit more insight in terms of some of the challenges that you are having with hosting your own runners? In regards to testing CI locally, did you mean having the ability to validate that a pipeline is fully functional prior to pushing your commit to GitLab?
  - kasbah 5y ago
    Not the OP but we can't enable our self-hosted runner on our open source project because if we do then the pipeline won't run on external merge requests. It simply fails with permission errors when we get merge requests. So we have to use the shared runners which are less powerful.
    - deastman 5y ago
      ok ping me on the epic link below. @DarrenEastman is the GitLab handle and let me know what compute class you are needing. We are planning to pivot soon on getting various compute types available on GitLab.com Shared runners. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2426 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2426
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  Hm? Actually you can indeed test CI locally, if only one step at a time. This is a very very rare feature. It’s gitlab-runner exec. Also, I find that running your own runner is super easy and straightforward.
handrous 5y ago
I hadn't used it much until maybe 3-4 years ago, but have found the UI confusing and messy that whole time. Then again, I also find Facebook and Twitter so confusing they're nearly un-usable, so maybe it's just me. GH and their clones are fine, though GH's starting to nose into "too much shit going on for me to make sense of it, and unhelpful information density/hierarchy" territory after the last major re-design and latest round of updates, too. Oddly, very complex actual desktop applications with tons of features rarely leave me feeling helpless and lost the way business productivity web apps so often do, unless they're something like Blender.
thiagocsf 5y ago
FWIW, you can turn off most things by going to the project settings under general, visibility. This reduces the menu items to a minimum.

GitLab is starting to become difficult to use due to the amount of features being introduced. It was simple but now it just looks and feels complex. Personal perspective, of course.

iKevinShah 5y ago

Not using it for enterprise (I am not the one who decides) but I started with Gitlab CE for my personal use (running in a docker container), it was exactly as you put it. It felt complex. Moved to Gitea and I am surprised by how fast git doing just git can be (on my limited hardware)

carlosf 5y ago

I'm a paying customer and I agree. Meanwhile many core features are still unpolished e.g.: running your own runners sucks and you can't test CI/CD locally.

jamietanna 5y ago
What do you mean re not testing locally? I've had good success with hosting a runner on my local machine and using it to run the jobs
deastman 5y ago
Hi Carlos, Darren here, PM for runner. Can you provide a bit more insight in terms of some of the challenges that you are having with hosting your own runners? In regards to testing CI locally, did you mean having the ability to validate that a pipeline is fully functional prior to pushing your commit to GitLab?
- kasbah 5y ago
  Not the OP but we can't enable our self-hosted runner on our open source project because if we do then the pipeline won't run on external merge requests. It simply fails with permission errors when we get merge requests. So we have to use the shared runners which are less powerful.
  - deastman 5y ago
    ok ping me on the epic link below. @DarrenEastman is the GitLab handle and let me know what compute class you are needing. We are planning to pivot soon on getting various compute types available on GitLab.com Shared runners. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2426 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2426
fuzzy2 5y ago
Hm? Actually you can indeed test CI locally, if only one step at a time. This is a very very rare feature. It’s gitlab-runner exec. Also, I find that running your own runner is super easy and straightforward.

handrous 5y ago

I hadn't used it much until maybe 3-4 years ago, but have found the UI confusing and messy that whole time. Then again, I also find Facebook and Twitter so confusing they're nearly un-usable, so maybe it's just me. GH and their clones are fine, though GH's starting to nose into "too much shit going on for me to make sense of it, and unhelpful information density/hierarchy" territory after the last major re-design and latest round of updates, too. Oddly, very complex actual desktop applications with tons of features rarely leave me feeling helpless and lost the way business productivity web apps so often do, unless they're something like Blender.

thiagocsf 5y ago

FWIW, you can turn off most things by going to the project settings under general, visibility. This reduces the menu items to a minimum.