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Jason's cool photo picker, or jibbly, and was forked from an abandoned project called EHT-sh (acronym meaning unknown) originally made by frederick lumberg, forked and owned by boops_snoops and actively maintained by Xxweeb-lord69xX.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how to build it (which doesn't work on your distro), but don't worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date and it magically appears on flatpak only after you've installed it by other means.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.
If your distro was arch, you most likely have the nightly build available on the AUR
Aur and pacman are 90% of why I use arch.
Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No
sudo make install
, nocurl .. | sudo bash
or whatever the readme calls for. Not because it's unsafe, but because eventually you're likely to end up with a broken system, and then you'll blame your distro for it, or just Linux in general.My desktop install is about a decade old now, and never broke because I only ever use the package manager.
Of course in your home folder anything goes.
How the fuck do you have a decade old arch installation? I have to reinstall it about every half a year because something breaks and its to complicated to fix it so I just choose to reinstall everything. In the 18 Months or so that I used Arch I had to reinstall it about 4 times. I don't even install that much stuff and I also don't go absolutely wild with configuration, but Theres A lot of stuff breaking in my system.
I also got used to just ignoring problems because I'm to lazy to reinstall everything or spend hours upon hours fixing my system.
Thanks for reminding me of my nearly forgotten Gentoo PTSD
You're welcome :)