Sooner or later I wanted to do at least a bit of posting about version control systems which I've worked with and which one of those I find the best for me. In past years I've worked with various version control systems, with various interfaces.

I personally have few years of experience with both, SVN and GIT - which both I used (and still regularly use) for various projects. The named are most famous ones, and personally I like and prefer git a bit more for having a lot of advantages over svn (and yeah, git has better memes - might be important too!).

For quite long I've stored some of my personal, or conceptual projects just on drive and copied it back and forth (not just old ones, incl. few very recent ones!). Knowing the advantage of version control (and actually having some interesting projects archived on my own Github account) I said to myself that it's definitely time to change this.

Now, as these projects are internal and I don't like paying Github for service, that can run on the server(s) which I'm already paying, I finally installed git - yet I was hunting for some visual interface to be able to see what goes on, add issues (which serve often also as to-do list for me), etc.

Out of the user interfaces one can host himself, I've used GitLab (which can do a lot more than I require - including CI, CD, etc.), which is perfectly suitable for the job, and it even exists as package in Ubuntu! There is one huge downside - it is extremely HEAVY (at least for the feature set I require). I indeed set it up, but I didn't like how much resources it used, despite actually not doing anything and working with just single user at that point.

Gitlab is huge, it has all the feature one can wish for. But after hours burnt on setting it up to make it work properly ... I asked myself, isn't there something better, that could be light, better fit for my simple use cases and easy to setup?

At this point I've searched and found GOGS, which is very simple to use (compared to GitLab, which often requires quite some time to setup - especially on servers running Apache), small, fast, etc. I couldn't find any real disadvantage to it. Did the 5 minute setup and here I go...

I was amazed, this hasn't happened to me in software for well... at least few months. How easy this was to setup in the end - and how fast (anything is opened within 100ms).

This brings me to: On one side, I admire complex and large software, like GitLab. It can do a TON of things, and it is very good in all of them. You want automatic-build and deployment each time you merge into master? You can set it up. You want strict permissions settings? You can set those. And so on...

On the other side, well I'm fan of simple software. That can be installed fast, used quickly without additional hours of setup and that is fast. I've switched from KDE to XFCE on my Linux boxes for exactly this reason.

Sometimes less is more...