11 ms·

Gentoo on Codeberg

436 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

iberator 8mo ago
codeberg is AMAZING and VERY VERY fast and snappy and EASY TO USE. I REALLY recommend it
- nubinetwork 8mo ago
  Fast? I clicked on a random ebuild, then clicked history... the page took over 60 seconds to load a single commit. I could have done that faster locally, or even on github. /shrug
- sethops1 8mo ago
  Codeberg was down for several hours over this past weekend. I want an alternative to GitHub as much as the next anti-big tech nerd, but let's not spread false narratives. Codeberg's uptime is probably a single nine right now, at best.
  - ashton314 8mo ago
    I mean… GitHub's uptime story has been getting worse… I hear you and you're right that Codeberg has some struggles. If anyone needs to host critical infra, you're better off self-hosting a Forgejo instance. For personal stuff? Codeberg is more than good enough.
  - b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
    it may be a rock and a hard place situation; they need the resources to address these issues but folks aren't gonna move their giant, mission-critical code there if they don't address these issues.
- ashton314 8mo ago
  For the doubters replying here, Codeberg really is on average faster than GitHub. It's great. Objective measurements here: https://forgeperf.org/ https://forgeperf.org/ Codeberg does suffer from the occasional DDOS attack—it doesn't have the resources that GH has to mitigate these sorts of things. Also, if you're across the pond, then latency can be a bit of an issue. That said, the pages are lighter weight, and on stable but low-bandwith connections, Codeberg loads really quickly and all the regular operations are supper zippy.
  - ahartmetz 8mo ago
    What I think after looking at these numbers is that we need to take the nuclear option - a native (no web stack at all) code review client. Seconds (times 100 or so for one larger review) are not in any way an acceptable order of magnitude to discuss performance of a front-end for editing tens of kilobytes of text. And the slow, annoying click orgy to fold out more common code, a misfeature needed just to work around loading syntax-highlighted text being insanely slow. Git is very fast, text editing is very fast, bullshit frameworks are slow. I don't think that it would take great contortions to implement a HTML + JS frontend that's an order of magnitude faster than the current crapola, but in practice it... just doesn't seem to happen.
cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
Great to see important projects like Gentoo showing it can be done This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet.
- simoncion 8mo ago
  > This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet. Gentoo's Github mirrors have only been to make contributing easier for -I expect- newbies. The official repos have -AFAIK- always been hosted by the Gentoo folks. FTFA: This [work] is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub, as already mentioned in the 2025 end-of-year review. These [Codeberg] mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of contribution too. And from the end-of-year review mentioned in TFA [0] Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. ... Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that. we learn that the primary reason for moving is Github attempting to force its shitty LLM onto folks who don't want to use it. So yeah, the Gentoo project has long been "decoupled" or "showing it can be done" or whatever. [0] <https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/01/05/new-year.html https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/01/05/new-year.html>
- tonymet 8mo ago
  Starting a migration is a lot easier than completing one.
mbreese 8mo ago
Is this the start of a more frequent code-migrations out of Github? For years, the best argument for centralizing on Github was that this was where the developers were. This is where you can have pull requests managed quickly and easily between developers and teams that otherwise weren't related. Getting random PRs from the community had very little friction. Most of the other features were `git` specific (branches, merges, post-commit hooks, etc), but pull requests, code review, and CI actions were very much Github specific. However, with more Copilot, et al getting pushed through Github (and now-reverted Action pricing changes), having so much code in one place might not be enough of a benefit anymore. There is nothing about Git repositories that inherently requires Github, so it will be interesting to see how Gentoo fares. I don't know if it's a one-off or not. Gentoo has always been happy to do their own thing, so it might just be them, but it's a trend I'm hearing talked about more frequently.
- JoshTriplett 8mo ago
  I'm really looking forward to some form of federated forking and federated pull requests, so that it doesn't matter as much where your repository is.
  - holysoles 8mo ago
    For those curious, the federation roadmap is here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m... I'm watching this pretty closely, I've been mirroring my GitHub repos to my own forgejo instance for a few weeks, but am waiting for more federation before I reverse the mirrors. Also will plug this tool for configuring mirrors: https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO Note that Forgejo's API has a bug right now and you need to manually re-configure the mirror credentials for the mirrors to continue to receive updates.
  - bsimpson 8mo ago
    I use GitHub because that's where PRs go, but I've never liked their PR model. I much prefer the Phabricator/Gerrit ability to consider each commit independently (that is, have a personal branch 5 commits ahead of HEAD, and be able to send PRs for each without having them squashed). I wonder if federation will also bring more diversity into the actual process. Maybe there will be hosts that let you use that Phabricator model. I also wonder how this all gets paid for. Does it take pockets as deep as Microsoft's to keep npm/GitHub afloat? Will there be a free, open-source commons on other forges?
xvilka 8mo ago
All everything aside, reviewing big pull requests on GitHub became nearly impossible - even with the simplest change view it makes you spend too much time on waiting for the page to load the necessary file first. The performance degraded significantly from what was the experience from 10 years ago. UI became an absolute mess. Maybe even vibe-coded.
- arccy 8mo ago
  They even have the gall to call it an improved UI for reviewing large pull requests. They must have let UI designers who've never written code before design it.
  - shimman 8mo ago
    IME those types of UI designers are way way way way more common, very few designers seem to understand the platform they are designing on and care more about aesthetics rather than proper platform designs.
  - bflesch 8mo ago
    That's what happens when the whole company uses high-end macbooks and nobody has an older PC. It's been noted thousands of times on HN but these US companies make money head over fist and do not give a single damn about people on "lower" end devices.
    - plorkyeran 8mo ago
      Large GitHub PRs are miserably slow even with a maxed out Mac Studio on gigabit fiber with single-digit ms ping to their server. It’s not an example of something that works well on high-end hardware but scales down poorly.
- bjackman 8mo ago
  Is there a good code review tool out there? The best one I've used is Gerrit, at least it has a sensible design in principle. Aside from that I've only used GitHub and Gitlab which both seem like toys to me. (And mailing lists, lol). But the implementation of Gerrit seems rather unloved, it just seems to get the minimal maintenance to keep Go/Android chooching along, and nothing more.
positron26 8mo ago
The reality of good competition is that competitors are built on good, cheap open source. No matter how decentral, a lot of users will want guards at the offramps and onramps. The only path for... everyone to create stronger competitive checks on services they rely on is to make sure that the open foundations are extremely strong. The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them. That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.
- carefree-bob 8mo ago
  The problem is funding. To be a real github competitor you need some serious infrastructure investment, which means you need to generate revenue and you start doing all sorts of stuff that is hostile to your free-tier userbase. Personally I wouldn't mind paying for access but I doubt there is a critical mass of users that can be weaned off of free access. Competing with free networks is hard. Codeberg, as far as I can tell, basically has a donation model where you can volunteer to pay and be a "member", but 0.5% of users choose that option, that is, they made a one time payment of 10 euros. That's enough to fund how many months of bandwidth and a couple of recycled servers. For cloud infrastructure standards are pretty high, you want replication, backup, anti-DDOS, monitoring, etc. All of that costs money. It would also help if they made it easier to donate with a paypal link instead of a SEPA QR code that requires an international bank transfer.
  - Brian_K_White 8mo ago
    Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost. Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc. Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative. If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small. (and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful) This will obviously have no effect on some people. But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green. And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything. Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it. Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free. Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that. And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology. I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost. But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing. That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers. That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape. About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.
cbarrick 8mo ago
I was familiar with the Gerrit workflow, but not the AGit workflow. The original AGit blog post is no longer available, but it is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo.info/en/2020/03/agit-flow-and-git-repo/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo.... From there, I found a dedicated Git subcommand for this workflow: https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go I really like what I've read about AGit as a slightly improved version of the Gerrit workflow. In particular, I like that you can just use a self-defined session ID rather than relying on a commit hook to generate a Gerrit ChangeId. I would love to see Gerrit support this session token in place of ChangeIds.
- eddd-ddde 8mo ago
  I prefer the Gerrit workflow over any other git-based workflow, specially since it seems to be going the Jujutsu route in the future: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/support-jujutsu-use-cases.html https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/support-jujutsu...
joecool1029 8mo ago
So I've started to use it since that's the way things are going. It's pretty drop-in compatible with how I used to use Github contributions for Gentoo. There are currently 2 downsides I'm facing: - It's slow for git command-line tasks, despite the site UX being much faster, git operations are really slow compared to Github. - It doesn't have full feature parity with Github actions. Their CI doesn't run a full pkgcheck I guess, so it's still safer for a new Gentoo contributor to submit PR's to github until that gets addressed.
- joecool1029 8mo ago
  > Their CI doesn't run a full pkgcheck I guess I stand corrected (thanks Sam): This was previously the case before they made the announcement, it’s fully working now. Feel free to contribute on Codeberg.
shevy-java 8mo ago
That's good. I am getting very annoyed at how US-dependent Europeans have become, ever since Trump keeps on threatening us non-stop. The Canadians understood the issue; European politicians are WAY too slow. There is a reason why Trump is also known as Agent Krasnov. Yuri Bezmenov predicted this in the 1980s; he literally explaind the "Flood the zone with shit" tactic, which is a KGB strategy (or, even older than the KGB). Steve Bannon only steals stuff; his mind is unable to devise anything on his own. I have not used Codeberg that much myself. I have known about it, but the UI is a bit ... scary. Gitlab also has a horrible UI. It is soooo strange that github is the only one that got UI right. Why can't the others learn from KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE?
- ahartmetz 8mo ago
  I find GitLab and GitHub to be very similarly bad-to-barely-acceptable.
frostworx 8mo ago
mmh, maybe the perfect time to leave github aswell and return to gentoo.
bramhaag 8mo ago
I really enjoy using Codeberg (as well as my own self-hosted Forgejo instance). It's fast and responsive, and if something is broken or inconsistent, it's trivial to create a PR and get it merged with minimal friction. It's a breath of fresh air after having dealt with GitHub's bs for many years.
susam 8mo ago
Codeberg is one of my favourite Git hosting services. It is (to me) what GitHub should have remained like. I have been mirroring most of my GitHub projects to Codeberg as well. Someday when I can afford the time, I might decide to make Codeberg my primary repository hosting service and GitHub the mirror. If you haven't seen it already, Codeberg is seeking donations here: <https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/ https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/>. A good way to support a product you like rather than becoming the product yourself.
- tonymet 8mo ago
  More power to them. But donations can’t possibly scale to the demand. They are already having significant capacity issues as evidenced to response time spikes throughout the week. It’s a great hobby app, and the forgejo software seems well assembled, but Codeberg needs to be a bit more forthcoming about their capacity before more large projects move over. I want to see larger projects like Gentoo migrate, but everything will come grinding to a halt if codeberg doesn’t come up with scalable resourcing (money & capacity)
  - bean469 8mo ago
    > More power to them. But donations can’t possibly scale to the demand. In my opinion, for a Git forge, switching to any other main source of income would almost certainly lead to some form of enshitification
    - tonymet 8mo ago
      they have a lot of options for sales. they can sell their service and run a not-for-profit enterprise. surviving on online donations is extremely rare. In their case, they are not getting that many impressions, so $1-$5 donations won't cover their expenses. Think of how expensive even a single customer like Gentoo would be if they fully migrated -- how many Gentoo contributors would have to contribute money to cover Gentoo hosting. I'm sure they have a sales pipeline planned, and similar to Facebook, they don't want to kill the buzz with sales before they build their audience.
whirlwin 8mo ago
Many European software companies are looking for alternatives outside the US now with the geopolitical situation between the US and EU. It's not only limited to the three big cloud providers, but Microsoft in general, in addition to other US providers.
mococa 8mo ago
I am also moving my "important for me" projects to Codeberg.
anitil 8mo ago
For all the negativity on github I will praise them for one really good feature - code search across an organisation. I've found it really useful particularly for 'platform' related changes to be able to find how other people in an org has solved a problem. It's particularly useful when the documentation only shows the happy path (or was written 5 years ago and 'oh nobody does it that way anymore')
- phoronixrly 8mo ago
  Is that a unique feature to GitHub?
  - plqbfbv 8mo ago
    No, Gitlab has it too (don't know about the others offerings). Gitlab integrates Advanced Search via Elasticsearch, last I checked they had plans to make zoekt available as an alternative.
  - anitil 8mo ago
    No I think all the platforms have roughly similar features (it's not too hard - I built a toy one in a weekend using sqlite's fts module), but the speed and usefulness seem much better than the other platforms I've tried
- Rapzid 8mo ago
  The unified search (org wide, across issues/prs/code) and custom search backend works really well. Honestly I don't understand all the GitHub hate recently. Honestly seems like a fashionable trend. Virtue signaling. There was a decade where they barely innovated. Maybe people forgot about that? Or maybe they are too young to remember? I'll gladly take all the advances over the past 8-ish years for the odd issue they have. GH actions has evolved A LOT and I'm a heavy Copilot user at the org/enterprise level..
  - jamesfinlayson 8mo ago
    I'm largely happy with GitHub though for public GitHub at least, search is now terrible - it doesn't seem to return anything when not logged in and if you are logged in the filtering options are limited (this was the case mid last year anyway - maybe it's improved but I've given up trying to use the web search).
myko 8mo ago
Forgejo is so nice, been hosting it locally for my projects for a year or so
_pdp_ 8mo ago
Well we started moving off the cloud. It is a lot easier then most people think. And yes Codeberg will most likely replace github for us too.
h4kunamata 8mo ago
So it begins..... Steam proved gaming doesn't depend on Windows, Linux can do it too. Countries in Europe feed-up with Windows moving to Linux LibreOffice is eating Microsoft 365 lunch Microsoft buying GitHub caused a mass-exodus, its AI push is causing another mass-exodus. Big open-source project moving away from GitHub, we only need a big player to make the move, followers will come.
- smlavine 8mo ago
  > LibreOffice is eating Microsoft 365 lunch This one misses the point entirely, I'm sorry to say. Microsoft 365's "lunch" is that a majority of US businesses, schools, and governments are reliant on 365 for anything in their organization to function.
  - okanat 8mo ago
    And also majority of European businesses and governments and schools. Europe is well integrated into US. Quite a few STOXX 600 have US wings or acquired US companies. Basically a substantial (non-software) enginerring or financial work is done in Microsoft's proprietary formats, occasionaly involving VBA. Many businesses cannot even pay salaries without macro-ridden Excel documents. With 365 Microsoft has even stronger moat: cloud integrated co-editing using desktop apps. No browser will exceed C++/C# Office apps running directly on the PC. Not even proprietary apps have equivalent experience. On top of that add all Azure, SharePoint etc. All big companies without exception use those and put significant portion of their business knowledge on Microsoft platforms. US can literally kill Europe by just forcing Microsoft to shutdown its operations. It is fucking scary.
    - M95D 8mo ago
      There are more effective ways of doing that. For example invalidate all european Visa and Mastercards. That would really kill most of Europe.
  - richardlblair 8mo ago
    That one made me lol. This same conversation happened a little while ago. Both powerpoint and excel are well ahead of the competition.
sunshinekitty 8mo ago
Great to see a move off Github, though Codeberg has poor service availability.
rorylawless 8mo ago
There is an entire ecosystem of products that have locked themselves (and their users) into Github for one reason or another. I hope a critical mass builds that forces them to open up to a wider range of alternatives.
gerdesj 8mo ago
I used to be a GH fanboi. Why not - very convenient ... errm and that's it. I now run a local Gitea. Its rather more performant and uptime is rather better too! I have no idea why on earth I even considered using GH in the first place. Laziness I suppose.
xbar 8mo ago
Thanks Gentoo! I've been forever happy that you are so committed to excellence even when it means being unique.
zoobab 8mo ago
Git was supposed to be "decentralized", but it never was.
- joelthelion 8mo ago
  This is completely untrue. Git is fully decentralized in the way it's designed. People use it in a centralized manner, but that has nothing to do with the tool itself. If you familiarize yourself with the way people use it for Linux kernel development, you'll see that it doesn't have to be this way.
phplovesong 8mo ago
What we reallt need is a place for secure hosting, one where AI is gatekept. Right now the big AI companies just steal code and no one does anything about it. Its pure theft. A blatant violation of copyright.
lccerina 8mo ago
Before everyone jumps on CodeBerg, please remember it runs on donations! It doesn't have Micro$lop money behind. Please donate to projects like this :)
- roflmaostc 8mo ago
  I remember recent discussions on the somewhat rudimentary physical server infrastructure. I would be a bit scared for a serious large project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132901
  - tonymet 8mo ago
    This can have pros and cons. They will get much more vcpu / dollar on bare metal. And they can develop great operational discipline if they do it right. On the downside, I don’t see them yet taking ops seriously. They are getting a lot of attention, but not yet establishing SLAs (at least not publicly). And their donations don’t seem to be scaling to the continued and expected demand.
zombot 8mo ago
Glad to see more projects migrating off GitHub. GitHub needs to be abandoned. We can do without MS's EEE and fuck ups.
gmerc 8mo ago
Anyone with a brain can see that Github will have to be enshittified at scale with the pressure created from AI Code and everything generation. These guys are just getting ahead of the curve

Gentoo on Codeberg

436 points by todsacerdoti 8mo ago

iberator 8mo ago

codeberg is AMAZING and VERY VERY fast and snappy and EASY TO USE. I REALLY recommend it

nubinetwork 8mo ago
Fast? I clicked on a random ebuild, then clicked history... the page took over 60 seconds to load a single commit. I could have done that faster locally, or even on github. /shrug
sethops1 8mo ago
Codeberg was down for several hours over this past weekend. I want an alternative to GitHub as much as the next anti-big tech nerd, but let's not spread false narratives. Codeberg's uptime is probably a single nine right now, at best.
- ashton314 8mo ago
  I mean… GitHub's uptime story has been getting worse… I hear you and you're right that Codeberg has some struggles. If anyone needs to host critical infra, you're better off self-hosting a Forgejo instance. For personal stuff? Codeberg is more than good enough.
- b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
  it may be a rock and a hard place situation; they need the resources to address these issues but folks aren't gonna move their giant, mission-critical code there if they don't address these issues.
ashton314 8mo ago
For the doubters replying here, Codeberg really is on average faster than GitHub. It's great. Objective measurements here: https://forgeperf.org/ https://forgeperf.org/ Codeberg does suffer from the occasional DDOS attack—it doesn't have the resources that GH has to mitigate these sorts of things. Also, if you're across the pond, then latency can be a bit of an issue. That said, the pages are lighter weight, and on stable but low-bandwith connections, Codeberg loads really quickly and all the regular operations are supper zippy.
- ahartmetz 8mo ago
  What I think after looking at these numbers is that we need to take the nuclear option - a native (no web stack at all) code review client. Seconds (times 100 or so for one larger review) are not in any way an acceptable order of magnitude to discuss performance of a front-end for editing tens of kilobytes of text. And the slow, annoying click orgy to fold out more common code, a misfeature needed just to work around loading syntax-highlighted text being insanely slow. Git is very fast, text editing is very fast, bullshit frameworks are slow. I don't think that it would take great contortions to implement a HTML + JS frontend that's an order of magnitude faster than the current crapola, but in practice it... just doesn't seem to happen.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago

Great to see important projects like Gentoo showing it can be done This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet.

simoncion 8mo ago
> This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet. Gentoo's Github mirrors have only been to make contributing easier for -I expect- newbies. The official repos have -AFAIK- always been hosted by the Gentoo folks. FTFA: This [work] is part of the gradual mirror migration away from GitHub, as already mentioned in the 2025 end-of-year review. These [Codeberg] mirrors are for convenience for contribution and we continue to host our own repositories, just like we did while using GitHub mirrors for ease of contribution too. And from the end-of-year review mentioned in TFA [0] Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. ... Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that. we learn that the primary reason for moving is Github attempting to force its shitty LLM onto folks who don't want to use it. So yeah, the Gentoo project has long been "decoupled" or "showing it can be done" or whatever. [0] <https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/01/05/new-year.html https://www.gentoo.org/news/2026/01/05/new-year.html>
tonymet 8mo ago
Starting a migration is a lot easier than completing one.

mbreese 8mo ago

Is this the start of a more frequent code-migrations out of Github? For years, the best argument for centralizing on Github was that this was where the developers were. This is where you can have pull requests managed quickly and easily between developers and teams that otherwise weren't related. Getting random PRs from the community had very little friction. Most of the other features were `git` specific (branches, merges, post-commit hooks, etc), but pull requests, code review, and CI actions were very much Github specific. However, with more Copilot, et al getting pushed through Github (and now-reverted Action pricing changes), having so much code in one place might not be enough of a benefit anymore. There is nothing about Git repositories that inherently requires Github, so it will be interesting to see how Gentoo fares. I don't know if it's a one-off or not. Gentoo has always been happy to do their own thing, so it might just be them, but it's a trend I'm hearing talked about more frequently.

JoshTriplett 8mo ago
I'm really looking forward to some form of federated forking and federated pull requests, so that it doesn't matter as much where your repository is.
- holysoles 8mo ago
  For those curious, the federation roadmap is here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m... I'm watching this pretty closely, I've been mirroring my GitHub repos to my own forgejo instance for a few weeks, but am waiting for more federation before I reverse the mirrors. Also will plug this tool for configuring mirrors: https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO Note that Forgejo's API has a bug right now and you need to manually re-configure the mirror credentials for the mirrors to continue to receive updates.
- bsimpson 8mo ago
  I use GitHub because that's where PRs go, but I've never liked their PR model. I much prefer the Phabricator/Gerrit ability to consider each commit independently (that is, have a personal branch 5 commits ahead of HEAD, and be able to send PRs for each without having them squashed). I wonder if federation will also bring more diversity into the actual process. Maybe there will be hosts that let you use that Phabricator model. I also wonder how this all gets paid for. Does it take pockets as deep as Microsoft's to keep npm/GitHub afloat? Will there be a free, open-source commons on other forges?

xvilka 8mo ago

All everything aside, reviewing big pull requests on GitHub became nearly impossible - even with the simplest change view it makes you spend too much time on waiting for the page to load the necessary file first. The performance degraded significantly from what was the experience from 10 years ago. UI became an absolute mess. Maybe even vibe-coded.

arccy 8mo ago
They even have the gall to call it an improved UI for reviewing large pull requests. They must have let UI designers who've never written code before design it.
- shimman 8mo ago
  IME those types of UI designers are way way way way more common, very few designers seem to understand the platform they are designing on and care more about aesthetics rather than proper platform designs.
- bflesch 8mo ago
  That's what happens when the whole company uses high-end macbooks and nobody has an older PC. It's been noted thousands of times on HN but these US companies make money head over fist and do not give a single damn about people on "lower" end devices.
  - plorkyeran 8mo ago
    Large GitHub PRs are miserably slow even with a maxed out Mac Studio on gigabit fiber with single-digit ms ping to their server. It’s not an example of something that works well on high-end hardware but scales down poorly.
bjackman 8mo ago
Is there a good code review tool out there? The best one I've used is Gerrit, at least it has a sensible design in principle. Aside from that I've only used GitHub and Gitlab which both seem like toys to me. (And mailing lists, lol). But the implementation of Gerrit seems rather unloved, it just seems to get the minimal maintenance to keep Go/Android chooching along, and nothing more.

positron26 8mo ago

The reality of good competition is that competitors are built on good, cheap open source. No matter how decentral, a lot of users will want guards at the offramps and onramps. The only path for... everyone to create stronger competitive checks on services they rely on is to make sure that the open foundations are extremely strong. The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them. That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.

carefree-bob 8mo ago
The problem is funding. To be a real github competitor you need some serious infrastructure investment, which means you need to generate revenue and you start doing all sorts of stuff that is hostile to your free-tier userbase. Personally I wouldn't mind paying for access but I doubt there is a critical mass of users that can be weaned off of free access. Competing with free networks is hard. Codeberg, as far as I can tell, basically has a donation model where you can volunteer to pay and be a "member", but 0.5% of users choose that option, that is, they made a one time payment of 10 euros. That's enough to fund how many months of bandwidth and a couple of recycled servers. For cloud infrastructure standards are pretty high, you want replication, backup, anti-DDOS, monitoring, etc. All of that costs money. It would also help if they made it easier to donate with a paypal link instead of a SEPA QR code that requires an international bank transfer.
- Brian_K_White 8mo ago
  Maybe we need a display that just shows each user approximately what they cost. Not a wikipedia banner. No guilt verbiage. No unrelatable total site/year numbers like "2.6M out of 5M goal" etc. Just like some little bit of ui in a corner somewhere that passively just sits there and shows it's state like a red/yellow/green light or a battery meter or something. And what it shows is some at-a-glance representation of what you are costing the service, positive or negative. If the org is open and low profit or even non profit, or even reasonable profit but organized as a co-op, this can be a totally honest number, which will probably be suprisingly small. (and if any full-profit type services don't like having that kind of info made quite so public because it makes it hard to explain their own prices, well golly that sure sounds awful) This will obviously have no effect on some people. But I know that something like that will absolutely eat at some people until they decide they will feel better if they make that dot turn green. And everyone else who just wants to take something for free and doesn't like being reminded of it, has no basis for complaining or claiming to be outraged at being nagged or browbeaten. It's a totally passive out of the way bit of display making no demands at all and not even hindering or speedbumping anything. Even when you click on it for more info and the links to how to donate etc, the verbiage is careful not to make kids or drive-by laypeople or anyone else without real means feel bad or feel obligated. We don't need your soup money, don't sweat it. Maybe even include some stories about how we all wound up in our high paying IT jobs because of the availability of stuff other people wrote and let us use for free when we were kids or former truck drivers etc, and so that's how you can understand and believe we really are ok with you now using this for free. Can't possibly get any lighter touch than that. And yet the fact that the little thing is just there all the time in view, that alone will make it like a voluntary itch that if you know you can afford it, you should make that light green. It's like a totally wholesome use of gamification psychology. I guess it will also have to somehow show not just what you cost yourself, but also what all the non-paying users are costing and what your fraction of that would be to cover those. At least some payers would need to pay significantly more than what they cost. But I'd be real curious to see just how bad that skew is after a while if a lot of individuals do end up paying at least for themselves, where today most of them pay nothing. That may make the need for whales much reduced and really no whales, just a bunch that only pay like twice what they cost. Or even less, a heavy user that costs more might be able to totally cover the entire cost of 10 other light users with only 10% more than their own cost. It could eventually smooth out to being no real burden at all even for the biggest payers. That's getting to be a bit much info to display all in a single colored dot or something without text or some complicated graphic, but I think this much could be shown and still be simple and elegant. Even a simple dot can have several dimensions all at once. size, hue, saturation, brightness, let alone any more detail like an outline or more complex shape. About the only thing I can see that is a bad thing is I bet this is a recipe for unfairly taxing women more than men. You just know that far more women will make that light green even if it's not easy, and far more men will happily let it ride forever even though they could afford it effortlessly, just to spend that $3 on a half of a coffee instead.

cbarrick 8mo ago

I was familiar with the Gerrit workflow, but not the AGit workflow. The original AGit blog post is no longer available, but it is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo.info/en/2020/03/agit-flow-and-git-repo/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo.... From there, I found a dedicated Git subcommand for this workflow: https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go I really like what I've read about AGit as a slightly improved version of the Gerrit workflow. In particular, I like that you can just use a self-defined session ID rather than relying on a commit hook to generate a Gerrit ChangeId. I would love to see Gerrit support this session token in place of ChangeIds.

eddd-ddde 8mo ago
I prefer the Gerrit workflow over any other git-based workflow, specially since it seems to be going the Jujutsu route in the future: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/support-jujutsu-use-cases.html https://www.gerritcodereview.com/design-docs/support-jujutsu...

joecool1029 8mo ago

So I've started to use it since that's the way things are going. It's pretty drop-in compatible with how I used to use Github contributions for Gentoo. There are currently 2 downsides I'm facing: - It's slow for git command-line tasks, despite the site UX being much faster, git operations are really slow compared to Github. - It doesn't have full feature parity with Github actions. Their CI doesn't run a full pkgcheck I guess, so it's still safer for a new Gentoo contributor to submit PR's to github until that gets addressed.

joecool1029 8mo ago
> Their CI doesn't run a full pkgcheck I guess I stand corrected (thanks Sam): This was previously the case before they made the announcement, it’s fully working now. Feel free to contribute on Codeberg.

shevy-java 8mo ago

That's good. I am getting very annoyed at how US-dependent Europeans have become, ever since Trump keeps on threatening us non-stop. The Canadians understood the issue; European politicians are WAY too slow. There is a reason why Trump is also known as Agent Krasnov. Yuri Bezmenov predicted this in the 1980s; he literally explaind the "Flood the zone with shit" tactic, which is a KGB strategy (or, even older than the KGB). Steve Bannon only steals stuff; his mind is unable to devise anything on his own. I have not used Codeberg that much myself. I have known about it, but the UI is a bit ... scary. Gitlab also has a horrible UI. It is soooo strange that github is the only one that got UI right. Why can't the others learn from KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE?

ahartmetz 8mo ago
I find GitLab and GitHub to be very similarly bad-to-barely-acceptable.

frostworx 8mo ago

mmh, maybe the perfect time to leave github aswell and return to gentoo.

bramhaag 8mo ago

I really enjoy using Codeberg (as well as my own self-hosted Forgejo instance). It's fast and responsive, and if something is broken or inconsistent, it's trivial to create a PR and get it merged with minimal friction. It's a breath of fresh air after having dealt with GitHub's bs for many years.

susam 8mo ago

Codeberg is one of my favourite Git hosting services. It is (to me) what GitHub should have remained like. I have been mirroring most of my GitHub projects to Codeberg as well. Someday when I can afford the time, I might decide to make Codeberg my primary repository hosting service and GitHub the mirror. If you haven't seen it already, Codeberg is seeking donations here: <https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/ https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/>. A good way to support a product you like rather than becoming the product yourself.

tonymet 8mo ago
More power to them. But donations can’t possibly scale to the demand. They are already having significant capacity issues as evidenced to response time spikes throughout the week. It’s a great hobby app, and the forgejo software seems well assembled, but Codeberg needs to be a bit more forthcoming about their capacity before more large projects move over. I want to see larger projects like Gentoo migrate, but everything will come grinding to a halt if codeberg doesn’t come up with scalable resourcing (money & capacity)
- bean469 8mo ago
  > More power to them. But donations can’t possibly scale to the demand. In my opinion, for a Git forge, switching to any other main source of income would almost certainly lead to some form of enshitification
  - tonymet 8mo ago
    they have a lot of options for sales. they can sell their service and run a not-for-profit enterprise. surviving on online donations is extremely rare. In their case, they are not getting that many impressions, so $1-$5 donations won't cover their expenses. Think of how expensive even a single customer like Gentoo would be if they fully migrated -- how many Gentoo contributors would have to contribute money to cover Gentoo hosting. I'm sure they have a sales pipeline planned, and similar to Facebook, they don't want to kill the buzz with sales before they build their audience.

whirlwin 8mo ago

Many European software companies are looking for alternatives outside the US now with the geopolitical situation between the US and EU. It's not only limited to the three big cloud providers, but Microsoft in general, in addition to other US providers.

mococa 8mo ago

I am also moving my "important for me" projects to Codeberg.

anitil 8mo ago

For all the negativity on github I will praise them for one really good feature - code search across an organisation. I've found it really useful particularly for 'platform' related changes to be able to find how other people in an org has solved a problem. It's particularly useful when the documentation only shows the happy path (or was written 5 years ago and 'oh nobody does it that way anymore')

phoronixrly 8mo ago
Is that a unique feature to GitHub?
- plqbfbv 8mo ago
  No, Gitlab has it too (don't know about the others offerings). Gitlab integrates Advanced Search via Elasticsearch, last I checked they had plans to make zoekt available as an alternative.
- anitil 8mo ago
  No I think all the platforms have roughly similar features (it's not too hard - I built a toy one in a weekend using sqlite's fts module), but the speed and usefulness seem much better than the other platforms I've tried
Rapzid 8mo ago
The unified search (org wide, across issues/prs/code) and custom search backend works really well. Honestly I don't understand all the GitHub hate recently. Honestly seems like a fashionable trend. Virtue signaling. There was a decade where they barely innovated. Maybe people forgot about that? Or maybe they are too young to remember? I'll gladly take all the advances over the past 8-ish years for the odd issue they have. GH actions has evolved A LOT and I'm a heavy Copilot user at the org/enterprise level..
- jamesfinlayson 8mo ago
  I'm largely happy with GitHub though for public GitHub at least, search is now terrible - it doesn't seem to return anything when not logged in and if you are logged in the filtering options are limited (this was the case mid last year anyway - maybe it's improved but I've given up trying to use the web search).

myko 8mo ago

Forgejo is so nice, been hosting it locally for my projects for a year or so

_pdp_ 8mo ago

Well we started moving off the cloud. It is a lot easier then most people think. And yes Codeberg will most likely replace github for us too.

h4kunamata 8mo ago

So it begins..... Steam proved gaming doesn't depend on Windows, Linux can do it too. Countries in Europe feed-up with Windows moving to Linux LibreOffice is eating Microsoft 365 lunch Microsoft buying GitHub caused a mass-exodus, its AI push is causing another mass-exodus. Big open-source project moving away from GitHub, we only need a big player to make the move, followers will come.

smlavine 8mo ago
> LibreOffice is eating Microsoft 365 lunch This one misses the point entirely, I'm sorry to say. Microsoft 365's "lunch" is that a majority of US businesses, schools, and governments are reliant on 365 for anything in their organization to function.
- okanat 8mo ago
  And also majority of European businesses and governments and schools. Europe is well integrated into US. Quite a few STOXX 600 have US wings or acquired US companies. Basically a substantial (non-software) enginerring or financial work is done in Microsoft's proprietary formats, occasionaly involving VBA. Many businesses cannot even pay salaries without macro-ridden Excel documents. With 365 Microsoft has even stronger moat: cloud integrated co-editing using desktop apps. No browser will exceed C++/C# Office apps running directly on the PC. Not even proprietary apps have equivalent experience. On top of that add all Azure, SharePoint etc. All big companies without exception use those and put significant portion of their business knowledge on Microsoft platforms. US can literally kill Europe by just forcing Microsoft to shutdown its operations. It is fucking scary.
  - M95D 8mo ago
    There are more effective ways of doing that. For example invalidate all european Visa and Mastercards. That would really kill most of Europe.
- richardlblair 8mo ago
  That one made me lol. This same conversation happened a little while ago. Both powerpoint and excel are well ahead of the competition.

sunshinekitty 8mo ago

Great to see a move off Github, though Codeberg has poor service availability.

rorylawless 8mo ago

There is an entire ecosystem of products that have locked themselves (and their users) into Github for one reason or another. I hope a critical mass builds that forces them to open up to a wider range of alternatives.

gerdesj 8mo ago

I used to be a GH fanboi. Why not - very convenient ... errm and that's it. I now run a local Gitea. Its rather more performant and uptime is rather better too! I have no idea why on earth I even considered using GH in the first place. Laziness I suppose.

xbar 8mo ago

Thanks Gentoo! I've been forever happy that you are so committed to excellence even when it means being unique.

zoobab 8mo ago

Git was supposed to be "decentralized", but it never was.

joelthelion 8mo ago
This is completely untrue. Git is fully decentralized in the way it's designed. People use it in a centralized manner, but that has nothing to do with the tool itself. If you familiarize yourself with the way people use it for Linux kernel development, you'll see that it doesn't have to be this way.

phplovesong 8mo ago

What we reallt need is a place for secure hosting, one where AI is gatekept. Right now the big AI companies just steal code and no one does anything about it. Its pure theft. A blatant violation of copyright.

lccerina 8mo ago

Before everyone jumps on CodeBerg, please remember it runs on donations! It doesn't have Micro$lop money behind. Please donate to projects like this :)

roflmaostc 8mo ago
I remember recent discussions on the somewhat rudimentary physical server infrastructure. I would be a bit scared for a serious large project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132901
- tonymet 8mo ago
  This can have pros and cons. They will get much more vcpu / dollar on bare metal. And they can develop great operational discipline if they do it right. On the downside, I don’t see them yet taking ops seriously. They are getting a lot of attention, but not yet establishing SLAs (at least not publicly). And their donations don’t seem to be scaling to the continued and expected demand.

zombot 8mo ago

Glad to see more projects migrating off GitHub. GitHub needs to be abandoned. We can do without MS's EEE and fuck ups.

gmerc 8mo ago

Anyone with a brain can see that Github will have to be enshittified at scale with the pressure created from AI Code and everything generation. These guys are just getting ahead of the curve