In preparation for the new year, I’ve been looking for a “better” way to manage what I’m “doing” and looking for a better task-board / ticket manager / project management solution to replace my current unholy and very-cursed mess involving paper notes on a whiteboard (magnets FTW), issues in Gitea (self-hosted) and a whole bunch of .md files in a git repository.

I tried out self-hosting Leantime in my development Docker environment. That was a waste of effort. It’s crowded chock-full of “premium” links that just take you to the paid plugin store. I fully expect artificial limits and nerfs to be enforced, too, if one doesn’t pay. (Their “pricing” page even alludes to this, stating that “self-hosted” includes the same as their cloud’s “free” tier. That would be 150 tasks. That’s borderline useless!)

Why ever would I self-host that? Even if I did, how could I trust it to remain free for the features I need, if it paywalls features in the self-hosted scenario? If I self-host it, I’d also want to be free to hack on it and potentially push merge-requests to an open-source project – why would I ever do that for a paywalled app I don’t get paid to work on?

My Docker dev. environment runs off a tmpfs so the daemon got stopped, umount /var/tmp/docker, and that shall be the last I ever see of Leantime. Good riddance.

The search continues. I’m open to suggestions of what’s worth trying, though. Lemmy, what would YOU actually trust?

  • Taiga is too broad. I tried it out with all the best intentions and, quite simply, it is too big. It is too complex and complicated and feels extremely heavy to use.

    From decades of professional experience, I know that all forms of planning are performed breadth-first and not depth-first. One jots down a bunch of titles or concepts and delves into them, fleshing them out and adding layers of detail afterwards. Taiga just doesn’t seem to facilitate that workflow.

    It is focussed on fixed ideas like “epics” and “user-stories” and its workflow needs one to understand how your planning should fit into those boxes. I never work like that: I don’t know whether a line-item on a scrap of paper is an “epic” or a “story” or just destined to be an item in a bulleted list, somewhere within something else. I don’t want to have to choose what level of the plan the line-item fits before I capture it in my project tracker – I just want to type it up, somewhere, and be able to move it around or promote it or add stuff to it or whatever, later.

    In summary: Taiga seems “fine” but just isn’t for me.