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As a GitHub user, I don't think I see the value in Gitlab relative to what they charge. I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product off

As a GitHub user, I don't think I see the value in Gitlab relative to what they charge. I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub and instead it's a bunch of loosely integrated, opinionated technologies/processes. Seems like by adopting Gitlab, you're adopting their view of how stuff should work. YMMV.

hericium 4y ago
> I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub I'm looking at this move/marketing of theirs as a show of being in opposition to Bitbucket which (along with other Atlassian's products) is made for managers.
pid-1 4y ago
I find their CI/CD much less opinionated than GitHub's.
deepstack 4y ago
main reason I use Gitlab instead of GitHub, MS. Won't touch a closed source MS project with 10 foot pole. Not after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel, etc.
- deepstack 4y ago
  otherwise, there are gittee etc that way more lightweight where you can self-host.
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    I don't know if it makes sense to compare a service with a software that could be self-hosted. But if it did, you may want to mention that gitlab can also be self-hosted.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel Do you have a source for this bold claim? HN should be for facts, not Reddit FUD.
  - gaganyaan 4y ago
    The OP was probably referencing this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY You can scoff at the resulting fears, but the variable existing is factual.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      I know that one but that was just speculation, there was no proof that having a variable called NSA_KEY in your code is an automatic proof of a backdoor. Heck, I can prefix all my variables with 'NSA' for the shits. Backdoors do exist but they're usually disguised as bugs, not so obviously in-your-face like that.
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      You can scoff at the belief in Microsoft's explanation, but the lack of any evidence of a backdoor in surfacing in the past 20+ years is factual.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  https://sr.ht https://sr.ht really good.
  - junon 4y ago
    Really opinionated and ideological. Be sure it's what you really want before you commit. Drew writes great code but he's very philosophical about his projects.
    - nickstinemates 4y ago
      > Really opinionated and ideological. Are you talking about the programmer who wrote the website? If so, OK, I guess. The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git.
      - junon 4y ago
        Both. And yes, true, but issue management is entirely via email and mailing lists a la savannah et al. There's no real way to interact with things from the site aside from looking at them. This is a huge hindrance to many users who are not familiar with the more classic way of working. It is certainly NOT a drop-in replacement for GitHub in most cases.
      - kanonieer 4y ago
        > The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git. I'm a paying customer because I really like the UI and the base git.sr.ht service. However, hosted Git today is much more than Git. And so my overall experience is similar to the parent, I find it opinionated and stubbornly ideological. I'm close to being fed up with the "my way or the highway approach" at every corner. Some examples off the top of my head: 1. I'm fine with sending patches via email, not every contributor is. So give me the option to accept pull requests. Instead, you'll be directed to tutorials teaching how to send patches. Needlessly increases the friction for a large portion of my peers. 2. I want to love build.sr.ht too. But, there's no Docker support. Instead you end up in discussions like "what did society do before Docker?". Give me the option to build some of my repos using my Dockerfile. Again, an ideological choice creating friction. 3. I want to use pages.sr.ht with Cloudflare. "Connections from CloudFlare’s reverse proxy are dropped." Why? "Do not help one private company expand its control over all internet traffic." OK. All these small restrictions and gotchas with the finger wagging tone amount up to a very oppressive experience for the user. At least, that's my experience.
- thejosh 4y ago
  Thinking that gitlab is any more secure than Microsoft when the NSA comes knocking isn't comforting. There is no way to know. But really, is your code and access that much of a secret to the government, and if it is, do you really trust "cloud" hosting? IMHO, Microsoft is absolute trash and their reputation isn't great, but since buying Github there have been very good improvements still being made to Github (CI.. though slowly, UI, etc). Better than being bought by Salesforce......
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    You can self host gitlab.
    - prepend 4y ago
      And GitHub, if you really want to.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        I don't believe that's true, but happy to be proven wrong. How exactly do you self host github?
        prepend 4y ago
        It’s called GitHub Enterprise Server [0] and has been around for a while. It costs the same as their saas product so there’s not much incentive to run it other than you just really want to host your own stuff. I haven’t evaluated it in many years but it’s supposed to have all the same features as regular GitHub. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overview/system-overview https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overv...
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Well look at that. Thanks.
lloeki 4y ago
> most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware GitHub offers self-hosted CI runners, but it's infamously limited. Last I checked there's still no official GH runner release for arm64-darwin (for which community, including yours truly, provided reliable workarounds through Rosetta that still lands you in an arm64-darwin bash, and now IIUC actual native builds[1]), there's no way to select anything else than x64 in the UI for Windows and macOS, which sets some tags on the runners that you can't remove, and there's no way to say "Other" with a custom value. Comparatively, gitlab-runner is a crazy adaptable piece of code, that allows for quite unique setups[0], combined with the loose way one can automatically assign jobs to runners using tags GL pipelines trounce GHA workflows†. [0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/ [1]: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805 † GHA covers 80% of cases (from basic to a bit more involved) somewhat nicely, but when it starts to fall short it's terrible. > A large bonus for Arm was that GitLab is open source and the company wanted to use its own tools to support its open source ecosystem. > minimize vendor lock-in > Because Arm is an IP company, security is paramount When GNU-ish philosophy meets business requirements. GitHub can be self-hosted (at a price!) but GitLab is FOSS, so it can be audited, and if necessary, forked. From code to data, it can be owned, end to end.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  GitHub internally doesn't support ARM so this comes as no surprise
goodoldneon 4y ago
GitLab's "premium" tier is the same price as GitHub's "enterprise" tier, and GitLab Premium looks to be enough for most companies
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  Maybe on paper, but the reality is MSFT has far more sku's. When you start bundling services/products with MSFT you're going to see big savings in other places, one of those places is likely GitHub. What if I told you I would throw in a user license for GitHub for each Visual Studio renewal based on 1K users? Now your company is saving 1.1M dollars by moving away from GitLab. I don't think the price is the same at all...
  - goodoldneon 4y ago
    Well yea, you'll save money if you use a bunch of Microsoft products and they give you a bundle discount. But a lot of companies rarely use Microsoft products beyond GitHub
    - bastardoperator 4y ago
      When you say a lot of companies you must be excluding every fortune 500 company. They have 1.9T market cap, lol. People are buying Microsoft products, and lots of it. I would considering your statement to be entirely false or based on limited personal experience.
bogwog 4y ago
Gitlab is amazing once you get into the flow of using it, especially if you self host. Github seems to be primarily focused on becoming a social network. That might be why it’s so popular for open source and individuals, but when I’m actually working, the extensive feature set of Gitlab is much more useful. Also Gitlab CI is a Maybach, Github CI is a PT Cruiser.
- goodoldneon 4y ago
  Agreed! I like working on open source stuff on GitHub but GitLab CI is so nice
- duxup 4y ago
  > Github seems to be primarily focused on becoming a social network. I think I understand why people say this. However, I hardly ever see any of that so it just doesn’t matter to me / isn’t a problem for me.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I worry a little bit. I ignore it for now but fear it may get to the point where I can’t ignore. One thing is their org structure is weak. They don’t allow sub-orgs or any organization. So if you have a big organization, it’s just chaos and their solution is to set up profiles and complex notifications. There’s no way to just set up groups and watch those while also being part of an overall org. I have 500 people and 250 projects in my org. It’s all private so they expect people to use social features for team awareness. A new member has to get a list of repos worked on by their team (maybe permissions are granted based on a team) and then go star and watch them. This is not a problem for a single coder or someone who’s on a few projects. But it’s not very good for an enterprise that already has an organization. Instead of tidying this up, github seems to be getting worse with feeds and stuff.
- ossusermivami 4y ago
  working with both APIs I feel the GitHUB is way ahead of other Git Forge APIs, see for example Github APPS, integration with webhook and oauth app is nowhere the same experience
INTPenis 4y ago
The strength of gitlab has always been their runner setup. Arm likely want to use this to run runners on any hardware platform, unrestricted. I'm still a strong gitlab supporter but tbh their development backlog is overflowing for the last 4 years at least. They have a TON of work to do and they seem to be focusing dev resources on what major clients want, instead of making the whole platform more robust. It's sad for us simple open source free tier users.
- wildmanx 4y ago
  Somebody needs to pay their bills. It's not going to be money coming in from the open source free tier users.
  - apple4ever 4y ago
    I'm sure they could capture more people if they had saner pricing. (Cheap single user plans, better plans for people who have a lot of users but not a lot of developers.)
- boleary-gl 4y ago
  Hi, GitLab team member here. There is work to do, and product and engineering are putting more focus on fixing longstanding issues, and increase reliability. Specifically for GitLab Runner, 15.0 and later bring many fixes, next to supporting podman. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues/?sort=updated_desc&state=all&milestone_title=15.0&label_name%5B%5D=group%3A%3Arunner https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues/?sort=updated_...

hericium 4y ago

> I think by chasing "DevOps" they no longer deliver a tight product offering like GitHub I'm looking at this move/marketing of theirs as a show of being in opposition to Bitbucket which (along with other Atlassian's products) is made for managers.

pid-1 4y ago

I find their CI/CD much less opinionated than GitHub's.

deepstack 4y ago

main reason I use Gitlab instead of GitHub, MS. Won't touch a closed source MS project with 10 foot pole. Not after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel, etc.

deepstack 4y ago
otherwise, there are gittee etc that way more lightweight where you can self-host.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  I don't know if it makes sense to compare a service with a software that could be self-hosted. But if it did, you may want to mention that gitlab can also be self-hosted.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel Do you have a source for this bold claim? HN should be for facts, not Reddit FUD.
- gaganyaan 4y ago
  The OP was probably referencing this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY You can scoff at the resulting fears, but the variable existing is factual.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    I know that one but that was just speculation, there was no proof that having a variable called NSA_KEY in your code is an automatic proof of a backdoor. Heck, I can prefix all my variables with 'NSA' for the shits. Backdoors do exist but they're usually disguised as bugs, not so obviously in-your-face like that.
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    You can scoff at the belief in Microsoft's explanation, but the lack of any evidence of a backdoor in surfacing in the past 20+ years is factual.
nickstinemates 4y ago
https://sr.ht https://sr.ht really good.
- junon 4y ago
  Really opinionated and ideological. Be sure it's what you really want before you commit. Drew writes great code but he's very philosophical about his projects.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    > Really opinionated and ideological. Are you talking about the programmer who wrote the website? If so, OK, I guess. The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git.
    - junon 4y ago
      Both. And yes, true, but issue management is entirely via email and mailing lists a la savannah et al. There's no real way to interact with things from the site aside from looking at them. This is a huge hindrance to many users who are not familiar with the more classic way of working. It is certainly NOT a drop-in replacement for GitHub in most cases.
    - kanonieer 4y ago
      > The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git. I'm a paying customer because I really like the UI and the base git.sr.ht service. However, hosted Git today is much more than Git. And so my overall experience is similar to the parent, I find it opinionated and stubbornly ideological. I'm close to being fed up with the "my way or the highway approach" at every corner. Some examples off the top of my head: 1. I'm fine with sending patches via email, not every contributor is. So give me the option to accept pull requests. Instead, you'll be directed to tutorials teaching how to send patches. Needlessly increases the friction for a large portion of my peers. 2. I want to love build.sr.ht too. But, there's no Docker support. Instead you end up in discussions like "what did society do before Docker?". Give me the option to build some of my repos using my Dockerfile. Again, an ideological choice creating friction. 3. I want to use pages.sr.ht with Cloudflare. "Connections from CloudFlare’s reverse proxy are dropped." Why? "Do not help one private company expand its control over all internet traffic." OK. All these small restrictions and gotchas with the finger wagging tone amount up to a very oppressive experience for the user. At least, that's my experience.
thejosh 4y ago
Thinking that gitlab is any more secure than Microsoft when the NSA comes knocking isn't comforting. There is no way to know. But really, is your code and access that much of a secret to the government, and if it is, do you really trust "cloud" hosting? IMHO, Microsoft is absolute trash and their reputation isn't great, but since buying Github there have been very good improvements still being made to Github (CI.. though slowly, UI, etc). Better than being bought by Salesforce......
- fartcannon 4y ago
  You can self host gitlab.
  - prepend 4y ago
    And GitHub, if you really want to.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      I don't believe that's true, but happy to be proven wrong. How exactly do you self host github?
      - prepend 4y ago
        It’s called GitHub Enterprise Server [0] and has been around for a while. It costs the same as their saas product so there’s not much incentive to run it other than you just really want to host your own stuff. I haven’t evaluated it in many years but it’s supposed to have all the same features as regular GitHub. [0] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overview/system-overview https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overv...
        fartcannon 4y ago
        Well look at that. Thanks.

lloeki 4y ago

> most of the new core infrastructure that Arm is deploying is on proprietary hardware GitHub offers self-hosted CI runners, but it's infamously limited. Last I checked there's still no official GH runner release for arm64-darwin (for which community, including yours truly, provided reliable workarounds through Rosetta that still lands you in an arm64-darwin bash, and now IIUC actual native builds[1]), there's no way to select anything else than x64 in the UI for Windows and macOS, which sets some tags on the runners that you can't remove, and there's no way to say "Other" with a custom value. Comparatively, gitlab-runner is a crazy adaptable piece of code, that allows for quite unique setups[0], combined with the loose way one can automatically assign jobs to runners using tags GL pipelines trounce GHA workflows†. [0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/executors/ [1]: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/805 † GHA covers 80% of cases (from basic to a bit more involved) somewhat nicely, but when it starts to fall short it's terrible. > A large bonus for Arm was that GitLab is open source and the company wanted to use its own tools to support its open source ecosystem. > minimize vendor lock-in > Because Arm is an IP company, security is paramount When GNU-ish philosophy meets business requirements. GitHub can be self-hosted (at a price!) but GitLab is FOSS, so it can be audited, and if necessary, forked. From code to data, it can be owned, end to end.

grepfru_it 4y ago
GitHub internally doesn't support ARM so this comes as no surprise

goodoldneon 4y ago

GitLab's "premium" tier is the same price as GitHub's "enterprise" tier, and GitLab Premium looks to be enough for most companies

bastardoperator 4y ago
Maybe on paper, but the reality is MSFT has far more sku's. When you start bundling services/products with MSFT you're going to see big savings in other places, one of those places is likely GitHub. What if I told you I would throw in a user license for GitHub for each Visual Studio renewal based on 1K users? Now your company is saving 1.1M dollars by moving away from GitLab. I don't think the price is the same at all...
- goodoldneon 4y ago
  Well yea, you'll save money if you use a bunch of Microsoft products and they give you a bundle discount. But a lot of companies rarely use Microsoft products beyond GitHub
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    When you say a lot of companies you must be excluding every fortune 500 company. They have 1.9T market cap, lol. People are buying Microsoft products, and lots of it. I would considering your statement to be entirely false or based on limited personal experience.

bogwog 4y ago

Gitlab is amazing once you get into the flow of using it, especially if you self host. Github seems to be primarily focused on becoming a social network. That might be why it’s so popular for open source and individuals, but when I’m actually working, the extensive feature set of Gitlab is much more useful. Also Gitlab CI is a Maybach, Github CI is a PT Cruiser.

goodoldneon 4y ago
Agreed! I like working on open source stuff on GitHub but GitLab CI is so nice
duxup 4y ago
> Github seems to be primarily focused on becoming a social network. I think I understand why people say this. However, I hardly ever see any of that so it just doesn’t matter to me / isn’t a problem for me.
- prepend 4y ago
  I worry a little bit. I ignore it for now but fear it may get to the point where I can’t ignore. One thing is their org structure is weak. They don’t allow sub-orgs or any organization. So if you have a big organization, it’s just chaos and their solution is to set up profiles and complex notifications. There’s no way to just set up groups and watch those while also being part of an overall org. I have 500 people and 250 projects in my org. It’s all private so they expect people to use social features for team awareness. A new member has to get a list of repos worked on by their team (maybe permissions are granted based on a team) and then go star and watch them. This is not a problem for a single coder or someone who’s on a few projects. But it’s not very good for an enterprise that already has an organization. Instead of tidying this up, github seems to be getting worse with feeds and stuff.
ossusermivami 4y ago
working with both APIs I feel the GitHUB is way ahead of other Git Forge APIs, see for example Github APPS, integration with webhook and oauth app is nowhere the same experience

INTPenis 4y ago

The strength of gitlab has always been their runner setup. Arm likely want to use this to run runners on any hardware platform, unrestricted. I'm still a strong gitlab supporter but tbh their development backlog is overflowing for the last 4 years at least. They have a TON of work to do and they seem to be focusing dev resources on what major clients want, instead of making the whole platform more robust. It's sad for us simple open source free tier users.

wildmanx 4y ago
Somebody needs to pay their bills. It's not going to be money coming in from the open source free tier users.
- apple4ever 4y ago
  I'm sure they could capture more people if they had saner pricing. (Cheap single user plans, better plans for people who have a lot of users but not a lot of developers.)
boleary-gl 4y ago
Hi, GitLab team member here. There is work to do, and product and engineering are putting more focus on fixing longstanding issues, and increase reliability. Specifically for GitLab Runner, 15.0 and later bring many fixes, next to supporting podman. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues/?sort=updated_desc&state=all&milestone_title=15.0&label_name%5B%5D=group%3A%3Arunner https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/issues/?sort=updated_...