Why is 1.8.x so broken

[Ben Oster]

I upgraded to 1.8.3 from 1.7.0.32509 and the functionality has taken a sharp nosedive.

Aside from the aesthetic changes which I find to be much less usable since everything is flat and less distinct (which is subjective), there are many objectively broken things in this "upgrade"

• You can not commit changes. After selecting my files to commit, I click the comment box at the bottom and "commit" is disabled. No matter what I type, or what I select, it typically stays disabled. I have to choose "commit options", then any option, then cancel, then commit becomes enabled and I can commit.
   
• The files in the view are constantly reordering themselves regardless of what sorting options I choose. I can not select anything over a couple of files without the whole list rearranging itself.
   
• Sourcetree keeps telling me my branch is out of date, even though I'm the only one working on it. I commit a change, then try to push it, and it tells me I need to pull... even though I know for a fact I'm the last one to push anything. OK... so I pull then sourcetree tells me I have conflicts. What?! Nothing has been comitted or pushed since my last push. There should be nothing to conflict with, let alone need to pull in the first place.
   
• Operations seem to take longer, but I can not 100% by how much.

I had to resort to using this page to find an older version to downgrade to:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/290155

[Seth]

Sounds like there is something strange going on with your machine/repo/installation. When Atlassian first released 1.8, there were a lot of serious issues (even besides the UI changes that got a lot of hate), but the serious bugs have been mostly addressed by now. I haven't heard anyone else complain about the issues you're experiencing, and I haven't experienced any of that myself.

I would be curious what conflicts SourceTree/Git think exist after you've done one of those pulls that shouldn't have been necessary.

What version of Git are you running? Are you using System or Embedded Git?