With apologies to the GitLab team, our views of how to make good software vary drastically and yours may be more in line with other peoples, but not mine: Maybe Gitlab's gotten better recently, but it's probably the most annoying piece of software I've ever used (well, second to Confluence maybe). It does everything which might be appealing to some, but for me it just meant everything was confusing, inconsistently labeled and documented, and/or buried under 5 levels of menus or under buttons that made no sense.

The way I explain it is you know how when your computer illiterate parents ask you to do some simple task that you have literally no idea how to do, but you look at some menus that have vaguely similar sounding titles based on your years of building up intuitions about how computer UIs work, click those menus, find what you need and do the task? GitLab breaks all those intuitions so easy tasks become hard.

YMMV, of course.

I've been using Sourceforge recently and am pretty happy with it overall, though it's still very alpha quality.

I think you mean sourcehut:

https://sr.ht

I hope so! If he really meant Sourceforge is alpha-quality after decades, I fear he'd forever be disappointed with the state of all software...

I hope so too, but mainly because sourceforge burned all reputation and trust for me, when they sneakily bundled adware to OSS installers.

lol, oops, yes, I did indeed mean sourcehut.

I like GitLab but it has to be the only product I've used that gives you a different form of navigation almost every time you visit the site.

Will it be at the top? Down the side? Tab based? Drop downs? Who knows!?

Meanwhile, Github's UI is so stable (outside of the super infrequent redesigns) you basically develop a muscle memory for it.

Gitlab is meant to be an alternative to entire suites of products from competitors so it makes sense. At work we make use of most of the features of gitlab so its a really great thing they include them all.

Honestly I'm not sure how you could even be confused by it as an individual developer either. I used it for my individual projects before getting a real development job and didn't have any issues. It different to github but not worse or less correct. Its just github has become the standard on what the default layout and names should be.

I mean, if you're an individual contributor who just sticks to making merge requests it's still more confusing than GitHub et al, but I'll grant that it's at least livable. If you have to touch literally any other part of it, or (in my case) are the person setting it up though it's just about impossible.

I've transitioned to gitlab for new projects about a month ago, and so far the experience has been great.

It might be me, but I don't see an option to disable Merge Requests in GitLab?

Hi, GitLab team member here.

You can find it in the project settings in the "sharing and permissions" section: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/#sharing-an... You can also disable the repository feature, and use the project for issue management only.

Heh, got it - I was looking under "Merge requests" :) Thanks both!

In your project "Settings" -> "General" -> "Visibility, Project features, permissions" -> "Merge Requests".

IIRC, you must be owner of the project.