Gitlab's UI is absolutely awful and incredibly slow. Would you say the same for other tools, like email, or your IDE or editor? They literally copied every functionality and UI of GitHub when they started out, and the only difference at the time was that Gitlab was a slower version of Github.
I'm glad you can self-host it, and that they're open source, they've got that going. But if GitHub would ever open source their tool, it's over.
I think you're using too much hyperbole -- it's all relative, and if you think Gitlab's UI is the bottom of the pile, you haven't used enough software and truly seen what bad UI looks like. I'm not saying UI doesn't matter, I'm just saying what they have is workable (and can get better, and they've expressed that they care to improve it).
Email, IDE, Editors are not the same as your code hosting, testing, deployment tool, that's a false equivalency. Maybe I must be the only one that is OK waiting 20 seconds for a merge request to complete.
I don't think it is reasonable to hold the fact that they copied/mimiced Github's functionality or UI when they started out against them. Society couldn't move forward if people didn't recycle and improve ideas.
As far as the differences go, while what you said might have been true, it's not these days. Also, you haven't addressed the point that Gitlab offers a shorter path to Doing It Right (tm) (albeit a pretty subjective definition of "right") than Github does.
That's a good question -- and of course, the answer is it depends. Having small focused tools is great, but that's only when the substrate/platform that lets you combine them is suuuuper good/standardized/well-designed.
`cat file.txt | sort | uniq` is excellent, but I think a lot of the ergonomics of that kind of small/focused tool reusability is due to the super low friction of using pipe, and how well STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR work behind the scenes. This kind of falls apart when you try and string together web services.
In my opinion, Gitlab's inclusion of so many parts of the process is good because it saves you from having to manage all the other tools, and it gives you answers for the complete process (where it's possible you could get painted into a corner depending on which focused tools you picked to do some pieces of the process, and have to write your own glue or go on a long search).
Sorry to hear you think our UI is awful. We're constantly trying to improve every part of the product, including our UX. There's a couple of ongoing initiatives currently, like the navigation overhaul [1]. You can list all current UX issues in [2]. We're also very appreciative of any and all community feedback. You can create an issue about anything specific you find bad in our UI (or any other part of the product) in [3].
We also like to think that we bring a couple of novel features to the game. You can check out a list of all our features in [4]
I'm glad you can self-host it, and that they're open source, they've got that going. But if GitHub would ever open source their tool, it's over.