Behemoth

「Ｂｅｈｅｍｏｔｈ」

@Behemoth

Stuck in a fish dream....

Heya! I'm Behemoth, and I'm a big ol' nerd. Professionally, I recently became a web developer, but I used to work at the Pike Place Market. FFXIV, JoJo, One Piece, Gundam, etc.

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Behemoth
@Behemoth
blazehedgehog
@blazehedgehog
Keeble
@Keeble

github might be one of the least intutitive sites to download anything from to a non-tech expert and what's particularly frustrating is the tech expert types seemingly having no clue that github is INCREDIBLY hard to parse

Keeble
@Keeble

seriously, look at this screenshot (for example) and tell me where im supposed to click to download what i need

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

the fascinating thing about the GetSoftwareProgramsNow type sites is that they are not a modern phenomenon so much as a reflection of the way legit sites looked in 1999. it used to be that you got all your apps from cnet or tucows or something and every one of the Download Sites had an incredibly busy three-column design where every page had dozens of unrelated things on it.

huge top banner with breaking news marquee, then the left column is a site menu followed by user stats followed by a poll. right side is one (1) vertical banner ad, then a dozen news items followed by links to Other Sites In Our Network. finally the center column has your download, except it includes a change log and a list of mirrors because CDNs didn't exist and even major orgs couldn't keep a single server viable.

it was staggering. back then however it was assumed that anyone who knew what a Download was was an enthusiast, because the full breadth of the taxonomy in most nerds minds was "nerd - grandma" with no in between; if you didn't know how to handle these sites, then by assumption you needed every little thing done for you anyway so you didn't matter.

github is the same thing but earnestly; the page is absolutely carpeted in info that even most enthusiasts don't care about, and the main nerds assume that if you can't navigate it, you're a grandma. the UpdateMyDriversNow sites on the other hand are like imitations of the old enthusiast sites, and one wonders why that seemed like the play.

Behemoth
@Behemoth

Ah yes, I remember the heady days of download dot com. Good times.

Anyway, I literally work professionally with git every day, and I always get confused trying to download a program from github.

It would be easier to clone the repo, but honestly I don't do that very often either. Depending on the language you're working in, there's probably some much easier method to get popular little add-ons than going to a github page. I am always always just using pypi or npm instead, where you can type like pipenv install bobs-cool-module and be done.

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in reply to @Keeble's post:

BappyDeerHooves
@BappyDeerHooves

github primarily hosts code, but it also provides a bunch of other services, like checking that the code is valid, and even turning it into executables (or otherwise "finished products") automatically every time you edit. that's done though "Actions", which you can see info about under the tab near the top with that label. it has probably the most confusing UI of any part of the site, and only allows you to download anything useful when signed-in

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niss
@niss

like, on the one hand, i agree with what you're saying, don't get me wrong. i am a Tech Person and i often get lost in github's labyrinthine website

but on the other hand, this is kind of a trick question because the answer has been cropped out of this screenshot

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plumpan
@plumpan

Came here to say this

But yes that's a stupid place for them to live, there should just be a releases tab at the top and even THAT'S not really going to make sense to people not familiar with github.

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Keeble
@Keeble

i figured this out eventualy, but "releases" does not parse as "downloads" to me at all. also that screenshot was all that fit on my screen, the tab is legit below the fold (so to speak) on my screen

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plumpan
@plumpan

Correct, a person going to a website to download a program should not be expected to gravitate towards "releases" by default. And yes, you still have to start scrolling to see it.

I believe github has a way to build a simple webpage for this exact reason, I do not know if you need to pay them for this feature or what other reasons more devs don't opt for it. It's more often that they have a downloads link in the README.md preview, which is alllll the way down past the whole file list.

This is all to say, you are correct, github is a terrible place for people to find their download.

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lapisnev
@lapisnev

IIRC you make another repository called username.github.io and push HTML/CSS for a static website.

And the problem is that Github does not have just one kind of download. Developers are there to download the source code, end users are there to download a binary release.

The actual failure in this process was a few steps ago where the project should have explained how to install from winget/chocolatey/brew/apt/yum or else have a download link on a dedicated project website that is not just the readme.md on Github.

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gabu
@gabu

to create a page for a project (as opposed to a user) its as simple as enabling pages in the repo settings and pushing your HTML/CSS to a branch called gh-pages and you're done. it'd be hosted on username.github.io/reponame/. pretty much the same

really just no excuse to NOT make a dedicated page for your project

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Zuthal
@Zuthal

Imo that is why if you link to something hosted on github, instead of linking to the repository main page, you should just link to github.com/foo/bar/releases/latest, which will point them to where they can download the thing right away.

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Keeble
@Keeble

i didn't crop it out as much as my screen did. i had to scroll down to see this on my standard hd computer screen. nevertheless i had no clue to look for a releases button or tab so i didn't figure this in the post

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niss
@niss

gah sorry i meant to say i agree that it should be much more prominent, but i forgot to add that part. yeah

(i also think that software that is actually ready for other people to use should have a real website, with a download button, and not just a gitbub, but....)

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aune
@aune

I... Kinda hate to be that person, but, I mean, that... Is kind of what github implies. The source control site. The place that has the code. Of the thing.

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fickleheart
@fickleheart

The problem is github is made for hosting code, not software, and people keep using it like a home page for their projects. A slightly better solution would be for the people doing that to link directly to the releases page since it's at least kind of navigable from there, but users should not be directed to github unless they're trying to look at code.

Hell, slap something together on github pages and link to that instead if one must. Then you can have an actual home page without any other service getting involved.

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elena
@elena

i don't think you can blame devs for using github like its sourceforge considering the fact that it's essentially sourceforge wearing a jaunty hat and always was. sourceforge had this ui problem solved over 20 years ago and it's on github for unsolving it, imo.

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elena
@elena

i do agree with you here, especially since they started packing in shitware without the devs consent but the big point i was making is 'github is only for code not using the code' is kind of a pathetic mewling response when it was actually done properly decades prior by something that is essentially the same, to the extent that github pages are basically just a remake of sourceforge project homepages (as opposed to the sourceforge-generated project pages)

it's like saying a doom clone fundamentally isn't designed to let you swap guns, only using the last gun you got until you run out of ammo and get swapped back to a previous gun

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beige-alert
@beige-alert

I used to build Linux kernels because you had to back then and that was before we even had "distributions" and also everything you compiled had been written on a Sun back then so you had to mess around with the #includes and stuff to build on pre-version-1 linux and so even though I know darn well you can download stuff from Github every single fucking time I'm like...what the fuck do I click on????

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in reply to @fwankie's post:

SuperBloodWolfMoon
@SuperBloodWolfMoon

I'm certain nobody actually knows how to use GitHub. Anyone who claims they know is faking it to sound like a tech guru and secretly has a bunch of forks they created on accident and just commits directly to master.
I had a college professor explain the site to me as part of a course in web development, and I still get tripped up by it.

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DrMel
@DrMel

There was some video floating around out there recommending using github as a general file storage platform and the comments were flooded with "yeah even people who use github famously don't know how to use it, try getting non technical admins to understand this".

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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

MorningSong
@MorningSong

The best part is, even if Github added an obvious, emphasized "give me the download" button, I (and probably a lot of techie users) would be extremely wary of it because decades of Dark Patterns have given me an anaphylactic response to clicking the emphasized button because that's going to be the one to send me more ads or ask for my credit card.

Then github is even worse for sending end-users because apart from the standard source archives that go with github releases, the files/artifacts have no standard names. I recently ran into a project where a (presumably pretty techie) user was trying to run an aarch64 binary on their amd64 machine because the actual amd64 binary was labelled musl due to being statically linked to musl's libc.

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noa
@noa

most software I've seen intended for people to use has its own website with a proper download button. The trouble is sometimes that website is below the github page in search results

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