I normally consider myself pretty handy with computers, but I’m no programmer. I know GitHub is primarily for programmers, but I often find GitHub pages when looking for specific programs, and always end up walking away frustrated because anything I try to download just gives me a whole bunch of unfamiliar file-names and what I’m guessing is some uncompiled data? I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub? I’ve heard something about Python and something about Cmd (Is that Windows Command Line Prompt?) and whenever I look up tutorials or guides for GitHub I find primer videos for programmers, not user friendly newbie guides for people who just want to download a piece of software.
In: Technology
The simple answer is that as an end user, you’re not really supposed to. Github is something specifically targeted towards developers. For end users the project should have some sort of convenient website where you can just download an installer.
While github does allow to release installers, most projects that do this kind of thing are targeted towards developers to start with. Anything intending to be user friendly should be using something other than github to interact with end users.
> I really don’t know, and it just confuses me what I’m supposed to do in order to actually execute files I find on GitHub?
That depends entirely on what you found. It goes all the way from very straightforward to spending a week setting up a very specific environment consisting of many parts.
Latest Answers