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Jason’s cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.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how to build it (which doesn’t work on your distro), but don’t worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you’ve installed it by other means.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.

  • Darohan
    38·
    3 months ago

    Helix Editor did this to me. They have so much documentation on their site about how to use the editor, how to extend it, theme it, etc., etc. What they didn’t seem to document, though, is that the binary is named hx, not helix :/

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      8·
      3 months ago

      The fun part is that as a dev, you don’t really know that either. It’s just the file name of the executable. Anyone can rename that.
      And even if it’s not renamed, you still don’t know, if your users need to call it with just hx or with ./hx or some other path.

      Obviously, you should mention somewhere that the executable is likely called hx, but because that requires an explanation, there’s certainly a tendency to not mention it very often…

      • Darohan
        81·
        3 months ago

        Congrats on expressing that in the most passive-agressive and gatekeepery way you could’ve. I’ve been using Linux for the better part of a decade now, and know my way around the usr dir - however things work a bit different on NixOS, whose package manager doesn’t involve installation steps beyond adding the word “helix” to my packages list. I’m not great at reading though, so I absolutely would’ve missed something as obvious as the Installation page 😅 As for your beliefs about postmodern Vim clones, what’s the point (and fun) in the freedom of choice Linux offers if I can’t install and try out the latest fun spin on an old fave from time to time?