I’ve been transitioning to Linux recently and have been forced to use github a lot when I hadn’t much before. Here is my assessment.
Every github project is named something like dbutils, Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.
There are either 3 lines of documentation and no releases page, or a 15 page long readme with weekly releases for the last 15 years and nothing in between. It is either for linux, windows, or both. If it’s for windows, they will not specify what platforms it runs on. If it’s for Linux, there’s a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means. Everything is written in python2. It is illegal to release anything for Mac OS on github.
You get used to how to find the right way of doing stuff. If you’re still in the Windows biased search results space, everything FOSS is made to look sketchy. Those search results are not deterministic. That bias is intentional. Eventually Microsoft stops biasing you or bribing Google to do the same and your search results will be better. Then you stop using the search results all together for the most part. You’ll figure out that the ways you did things in the past were inefficient and usually wrong. There are better ways that you’ll discover and those repos are self hosted or on gitlab or elsewhere. You eventually just use RPM fusion, or you setup distrobox with Arch and the AUR, or you toss on the Nix package manager and start using flakes. The vast majority of my initial headaches were due to trying to replicate Windows workflows. Then I learned all of that was weird and pretty backwards.
