Try Ubuntu Mate, it's actually ok. I'm alot not the biggest fan of snaps. I try and get .debs or apt get, where I can. App Images seem a little odd to me, but Flatpack seems alright.
I would try Vultr, if DO is being weird. They are awesome and have very similar pricing to DO.
Hetzner is ok as well, but they have annoying DDoS filtering.
You could also try AWS ARM EC2, but they're expensive for bandwidth by comparison.
GitLab is really nice, just needs like 6-8gb of ram, vs 1 for GitTea. Are you working with other folks, or is it just for personal stuff? I run a small GitTea server myself for super private stuff. The rest I just put on GH.
Wow I forgot about #! . That was a neat distro.