So long, GitKraken

After nearly 6 years of using my favourite Git GUI, a disastrous outage led me to turning over a new leaf.

On September 18th 2023, GitKraken experienced an outage impacting their licensing servers, that lasted for several hours. The immediate result was that every paid user was effectively deemed a "Free Plan" user, completely locking them out of private repositories (access to private repos being a paid feature). Users would also get a notification that their subscription had expired, prompting confusion. Especially with anyone who only recently had renewed their yearly subscription.

People immediately took to Twitter, waiting for an acknowledgement from the GitKraken team that they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix. Unfortunately, it took the GitKraken team several hours to formulate said reply, paired with an update to their status page. This update however, provided little to no information on the actual issue, aside from stating partial disruption:

Non-negotiable

That said, the lack of clear and timely communication was not what caused me to switch. What did was the following:

• The GitKraken client performs no caching of subscription tokens
• it also doesn't have any kind of grace period
• let alone a gracious response to cloud outages

This made me effectively incapable of using their software in my specific professional setting:

I was unable to commit to a private repository for hours, even though my subscription was valid until February 2024.
Regardless of how long I had been using GitKraken problem-free, and regardless of how much I loved their products, this was and still is a non-negotiable for me.

A new leaf... er fork

Thus began a search for a new Git GUI client. For critical and immediate changes I temporarily relied on VS Code's Git client, which was not ideal.
I prefer having a view on changes inside the repository, not just my (un)staged changes. I'm working in a collaborative environment after all.

After a quick search through popular Git clients, I eventually followed up on a colleague's recommendation and tried out Fork. I must say, integrating with a VPN-locked, private Bitbucket repository actually felt so better much compared to GitKraken! I was not expecting that.
Additionally I installed GitHub Desktop for any personal work that could benefit from it, but I honestly doubt that I'll need it anytime soon.

Will Fork last me another 6 years like GitKraken did? Only time will tell, but I have committed to paying their one-time fee, once I'm used to it after a couple weeks of usage.

And, who knows! Hopefully GitKraken improves their disaster recovery protocol as well as graciously handling outages. Especially on the end-user's side! I might even come back if they do, but for now I'm sticking with Fork 🩵.