(Didn’t get to finish comment earlier)

I also think this is a huge problem that developers overlook when it comes to users. I do get that there are probably things like you say that GitHub does well that are not obvious to non-devs, but essentially 99% of open source software says “Download it at GitHub (LINK)!”

I would like to have widespread adoption of open source software but as long as the UI complaints are answered with “GitHub isn’t for installing software,” that’s never going to happen.

I originally meant the OP to be funny, but it does actually matter. And unfortunately developers generally have a very terrible sense of the user perspective and I don’t think many realize how much that determines the success or failure of a piece of software - and often the cleanliness and security of its function is a distant second. I’ve seen really cool tools sit unused and I literally think it’s because there was no UI or visual design to get a user to understand their relationship to it.

In short: I think user design is a massive, unaddressed problem in open source software, & we should start thinking about it very hard, or we are going to lose to the same centralized, closed source crap for no other reason than we didn’t know how to communicate with normal humans 😆