Git Hub is not a place to download software for any purpose other than to use for further development of other software. It just isnāt, isnāt supposed to be, and shouldnāt be that. If software you need is on github, and itās not directed at developers, then the person who created that software fucked up, not GitHub. It Is Not A Download Site, that is occasionally a thing you CAN do or might want to do, but it is truly not the focus of the site and never will be. Thatās literally just -not what it is for-. Mostly stuff on github is there so it can be installed via command line tools/ssh/git. That is why itās called āgithubā. It is not designed to be used by anybody who does not know what git is, because there are other sites for that.
Also, the reason why you donāt always find the same places to download stuff on every project is because that is literally up to the maintainer of the project. Some projects have releases; some donāt. Because you can upload works in progress to the site that arenāt in a releasable state, and some people never create releases, or compile the code for you. There are tons of reasons for that, like laziness or impracticality or maybe it just isnāt relevant to the page at hand. That is different for every single project.
GitHub is literally just source code hosting first, everything else is there because it is sometimes relevant to hosting source code.
(This has come up over and over every few months and seems to be a thing a lot of people think/talk about for some reason so i want to address it lol)
the issue feels broadly similar to "JOIN OUR DISCORD FOR THE DOWNLOAD" (although Github is absolutely the lesser of two evils there) - people just don't want to maintain a website on top of the thing they're doing, even if that'd make it a lot easier to link to the latest releases page in a clear way
github might not be intended for this, but they sure do provide a lot of infrastructure to make it easier, and even a small github pages site is going to be too much of an additional overhead for some
(developers - if you're hosting stuff exclusively on github - and especially if it's meant for a non-developer audience to use, take 5 minutes, at least make sure your README.MD has a downloads or getting started section (near the top!) that either links to the releases page or details the download as zip button)
