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291 points

GitHub has bad UX for people who just wanna download and use the programs

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14 points

I fixed it for them

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4 points
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What about up by the name of the repo? Your suggestion still looks almost reasonable, I like it!

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4 points

Yeah actually that could work as well. Would be a really easy greasemonkey script

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18 points

I swear they move the link to release page every few months.

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0 points

They purposely hide it, because they don’t wanna tend to normies

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91 points

Excel has a bad UX for people who want to use it to make art

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2 points

But if you want to put a some text and pictures in very specific locations and never worry about them suddenly jumping into random places, Excel is actually better than Word. That’s why people tend to use Excel for all sorts of weird purposes like that. Unlike with Word, things actually stay where you put them.

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3 points

Yes and there are definitely people who use excel for art. Just like there are people who use GitHub for its releases page. It’s just not the primary use of either program.

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40 points
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Do most people who use Excel also make art with it? Because sometimes devs also just download exe files on GitHub :D

They don’t just always copy code from there.

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6 points

Do MOST people who use GitHub download .exes? In my experience the VAST majority of people are using it for source and version control, not external releases. The overwhelming majority. FOSS and OSS is a small portion of the overall GitHub user base compared to, say, enterprise companies.

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14 points

GitHub, Inc. (/ˈɡɪthʌb/[a]) is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub

Yes it has other functions too, but it’s primarily for code.

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21 points

That’s not really what it’s designed for though

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19 points

It doesn’t have to be a compromise imo. Most people just need a visible download button on the front pages. Wouldn’t hurt devs at all. I mean, even devs sometimes struggle with this lol.

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-4 points

It doesn’t have to be a compromise

You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Any change to appease you would be a compromise, you understand this, yes?

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28 points

GitHub has bad UX for a lot of things

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29 points

The Github UX is amazing if you ever had to use gitlab or bitbucket

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1 point

The worst part about Bitbucket is the horrible, godawful, practically useless search

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5 points

Comparing bad to bad doesn’t make any of them better lol

I’ve gone nuts trying to download a single file from the git website on my first interactions with it (because somehow adding a download file button when you’re viewing a file on the site is just too much to handle)

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2 points

I’m not so sure. I seem to be able to find my way around a GitLab project in much fewer moves than a GitHub project. But maybe I’m biased because I use it all the time at work. I know they change the sidebar a lot, though.

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4 points

It’s not black and white. I actually liked a few things better about bit buckets UI. It’s been too long to remember specifics though I think it was concerning PRs and diffs. I still think GitHubs review UI is too complicated. It took me literally years to fully understand it.

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53 points

not only the ux, some devs make it absurdly confusing to find a binary.

I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, but there’s this one niche app.

their github releases at one point were YEARS out of date, they only linked to the current version in seemingly random issue reports’ comments. And the current versions were some daily build artefacts you could find in a navigation tree many clicks deep in some unrelated website. And you’d better be savvy enough to download a successfully built artefact too. And even then the downloaded .zip contained all kinds of fluff unnescessary for using the app.

The app worked fine, sure, but actually obtaining it was fairly tricky, tbh.

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11 points

These build artefacts probably weren’t meant for end users, that’s why they contained the “unnecessary fluff”.

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6 points

absolutely, but they were in general (IIRC) suggesting them for the main downloads, but just not telling anyone outside the comments, which was the weird part

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145 points

I’d agree, but the caveat is that github is primarily about an interface for source control and collaboration between developers for projects. The release page is really just an also-ran in terms of importance.

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71 points
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Imo they aren’t even trying, because it’s not that hard to make it better. Doesn’t even have to be a compromise. Most people just need a visible download button for the programs, that’s all.

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4 points

SourceForge had a better UX for those who just want to download software.

And SF is horrible, so this says a lot.

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8 points

Imagine how many download buttons would be if Github had ads.

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3 points

There is, it’s literally right there on the home page of the project. You can either copy a URL and download it by cloning the git repo, or you can download the whole project as a zip file. Then you just have to compile it!

GitHub is for developers, not end users.

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51 points

If that’s a concern for the project maintainers, they should create a homepage for the project with download links.

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19 points

I’ve bounced off GitHub more than once trying to figure out how to download the .exe file that I assumed must be somewhere. Honestly I still don’t understand the interface and I’ve submitted bug reports for Jeroba on there. I might have even used GitHub for a project once? Every time I look at it it’s overwhelming and confusing and none of it is self-explanatory. But, that’s fairly true for a lot of stuff in programming.

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20 points
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If there is an exe, it’s under the releases link. On desktop it’s on the right sidebar below “About”. On mobile it’s at the bottom after the readme blurb.

It’s not obvious because the code is the main focus and GitHub would much rather people host their releases somewhere else.

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3 points

That’s where it is? I’ve been sneaking my way in by clicking tags and then the releases toggle!

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8 points

And even if releases are hosted on github, there should ideally be a download links page somewhere that presents the different binaries or installation files in an easier to understand format, especially if the software is designed for non-developers.

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