Github and tools like it are designed for codebase versioning. It's a great tool for developers who have a need to collaborate with others and manage releases/branches. But, it's really not great for distributing executable apps to end users because it's not for that. You shouldn't tell end users to clone a git repo and type make install, because that's not normally how people manage software.

If possible, the app should be packaged and in a software repository/app store typical of the platform. Chocalatey on Windows (Microsoft has their own Windows Store, but fuck that), Brew on MacOS...if we're talking about an end-user application for Linux, I'd recommend Flatpak because it's become the de facto one to rule them all; if you really must host something on your own website right next to a windows .exe I will say go with appimage.

You can get hosting for distributing end user apps, Github has a service called Github Pages for this purpose, for example. But especially in the Linux world, too many creators of little things like to just point you at their git repo and only accept user feedback in the form of pull requests.

[–] Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Windows store, play store, snap store...many options for software publishing. GitHub should stay as a code repository

[–] frippa@lemmy.ml -2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Not OP but many Linux project I follow, since they don't have many resources, publish their releases through Torrent, a seeebox is fairly cheap (something like €10 a month) and could be easily crowdfunded even for a small project, and isn't a huge expense anyway. And the site could just be a static page, or better yet the magnet link could be aviable on Github for people that want the precompliled binaries instead of the source.

E: did i say something controversial?