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?
I recently installed Planka and am very happy with it. It’s a straight clone of Trello except blazing fast and foss.
This is perfect if you’re going the kanban route, which is arguably sufficient. It’s nice that they have different deployments and a demo.
I do like putting task-cards in columns and dragging them from left to right but I’m explicitly not going the Kanban route nor the Scrum route. I reject the prescriptivism that inevitably accompanies those “brand name” methodologies, even while I acknowledge that both methodologies do encompass several excellent ideas one might usefully borrow.
In fact, I always rather liked Trello simply because one could do whatever the heck one wanted with its boards – and the hotkeys were brilliant. (If I test out Planka, hotkeys will be evaluated for sure!)
Sadly, Trello devolved into and, yeah, I wouldn’t touch any Atlassian[1] product with a barge pole, today, nor have I in years.
Do they still charge for dark-mode in some of their products? Anyone who has managed a large team that includes neuro-diverse developers knows that dark-mode is tantamount to an accessibility feature and charging for it is just a dic•-move. ↩︎
Ta. Along with Taiga – which is presently first in the queue to try out[1] – I’ve added Planka simply because it looks so immensely and elegantly simple and down-to-earth. I shall not be surprised if Planka wins out from pure simplicity: that would be the same reason why I migrated my self-hosted environment to Gitea (from GitLab)
Planka actually looks to do precisely what I want where as Taiga appears to be an Eierlegende Wohlmilchsau. The latter is great when one actually wants wool, milk and pork, but I’m thinking I only want the eggs. ;)
Planka’s live demo is just so easy, too. And it does Markdown footnotes which Taiga doesn’t. I could live without them but… I LIKE FOOTNOTES. ↩︎
I use nextcloud tasks and deck for keeping track of things. Tasks is great for checklists, calendar integration, reminders, etc., I use it for simple reminders like trash day, and things I don’t want to bother with making a calendar event for. You can have it make a calendar event, but I don’t. Deck is a kanban style thing with calendar integration as well, it’s a bit more job-task oriented so I use it to help me juggle tasks when I have a lot of projects that need keeping up with. Setting up nextcloud is way overkill for just those features, though. If you’re not looking for the other features of nextcloud, I don’t think it’d be worth it.
It is pretty easy to set up if you go the nextcloudpi route on Debian, you don’t need a raspberry pi. Any computer running Debian can do it, but you may need to install a few dependencies if you’re on minimal Debian that aren’t listed anywhere, at least last time I set it up they weren’t. But again, if you aren’t looking to use the rest of nextcloud, I wouldn’t go that route.
The classic libre task tracker is Bugzilla. It’s definitely geared towards software development and large projects with multiple people though, and you won’t find anything like a kanban view, so it may or may not be suitable for you.
I know Bugzilla from the days of yore. I haven’t actually used it since about 2007, I estimate, and I’m happy to say that your post didn’t trigger any hyper-ventilation or other post-traumatic-stress reactions so I do appear to be recovering. 🙃
You are right, though: it is very classic. And libre.
Vikunja is free to self host. It has a polished appearance but sometimes a little rough around the edges in function. I chose it as it’s useful for tasks across multiple users.
Vikunja is great. Classic tasks, Gantt, tables and kanban - take your pick. Very stable as well, have been using it for years now.
I second Vikunja. I’ve been using it for 2 years with 4 users in my instance. It works great for shared tasks/teams and even sharing projects with people who don’t even have an account.
I use Tasks.org to sync to mobile and it works flawlessly
I use gitea, with sometimes nextcloud tasks. I only make gitea issues for longer lived or more complex tasks because I can take a lot of notes along the way, and nextcloud tasks only for things that I want to show up in my calendar.
it would be so good if there was some kind of integration between the two, to create tasks for issues with a deadline.
earlier I have used vikunja instead of nextcloud for tasks, but it has the same limitations, plus thunderbird is not compatible with it (the only half decent calendar software I know of for windows), and the web client makes itself unusable when there’s no network, by which I mean you can’t even read the pages that you made sure to preload
I’ve recently started using a kanban board which has been working well for me.
There are several options, I use obsidian for this because I can easily make a task into a note for further details.
Not FOSS of course but the .md file are easy to access and backup and i use the self hosted live-sync plugin to sync between 3 devices
I’m thinking to try Taiga, next, but not today. Their pricing page doesn’t seem to indicate that self-hosted instances will be limited and there are other overtly positive signs on their site, too.
Self-hosting is an option they openly promote on the landing page. If you use
ctrl+fto search forself-host, you immediately find a link to documentation on how to do that.Has anyone any experience of Taiga? Horror stories? (Save me time!) Or good recommendations are also welcome.
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.
Don’t know about Taiga specifically, be it it is from the same company that made Penpot (a graphic design tool similar to Canvas, https://penpot.app/ ) and working with that was great. So if they share a common development philosophy I can see Taiga working really well.
I did know about the association with PenPot but hadn’t actually looked at that because that’s not what I’m seeking, presently. But, I did, now, and they are the same people and I also find it very reassuring to see this as No 1 in their FAQ, too:
Penpot is Open Source, and self-hosting Penpot will be free forever.
There are many recommendations in this thread – Wow! Thanks, Lemmy – but I think I shall begin with trialling Taiga, first, and report back on my findings.
I spent AGES trying to do this and trying out all sorts of apps.
The best solution (for me at least) was self-hosting Nextcloud and using its Calendar and Tasks apps (and using it’s CalDAV to keep tasks and appointments in sync in various apps across my devices). I’ve never got the hang of Kanban so can’t comment on how good it is. I also keep my scratchpad/fleeting notes using Nextcloud Notes.
I believe this might fit your use. https://onedev.io/ it’s open source as per here: https://github.com/theonedev/onedev When I worked for BioWare for ten years (EA for 13) we used a very awesome product called QuickBuild (Build system, Jenkins is trash. QB is based on Hudson) made by them, pmease. Robin Shine is the dev and he’s really cool, very responsive. Check it out, they make good stuff.
At this point my peers would be upset if I didn’t mention our one true build saviour Bazel. Here, take this pamphlet.
Bazel > gitlab-ci > everything , apparently.
(I don’t work on Bazel, but some of my peers work with it. I don’t even know whether it’s self-hosted)
