As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.
While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.
The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.
Same reason we ended up with git. Their predecessors were significantly worse, and then they had enough momentum to keep going.
You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?
Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
Self-hosted free software:
Gerrit <https://www.gerritcodereview.com> Phorge <https://we.phorge.it>
SaaSsy:
Codeberg <https://codeberg.org> SourceHut <https://sr.ht/>
There are a lot more, of course, these are just the ones I have experience with.
Not really. It's pointless to go around accusing everyone of picking what they believe to be subpar alternatives when they even fail to establish what the par actually is, let alone what would be a preferred option.
It's as if they post this blend of comments just to try to feel smug.
> There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
See, that's what makes these exercises pointless. Those might work for your weekend pet projects, where you have the luxury of wasting all Sundays toying with how to deploy CICD systems because you have nothing better to do. For actual work, not so much. For example, SourceHut is renowned for being in perpetual alpha. It's baffling how it's being floated as a reasonable alternative to either GitLab or GitHub. Here's what they have to say about the risk of choosing them at this stage: