(The company claims to be getting around to it eventually - a GitHub open issue thread on the topic has been officially tagged “future-work.” But: basically, the whole of GitHub is already built for programmers, and most of us get there on our own just fine. I can see reasons why GitHub didn’t commit resources to building a Linux version of GitHub Desktop, at least as a first priority. Producing a tool for programmers without Linux support, srsly? The open source community jumped in, because yay awesomeness, and there is now at least one working Linux version of the Desktop app, this one housed in a fork created by Jiawen Geng. One thing that puzzled me right away, though: given that Desktop 1.0 has been in beta release since May, and this is finally the Official Release, I was surprised to find that there is no Linux version of the application. how cool would that be? - but if there is one it’s not obvious, at least to me upon initial inspection, and I haven’t yet taken time to dig for it.
#Github desktop client code
And speaking of desktops, I’m hoping there is a utility in there that generates desktop notifications when issues are created, code is pushed, etc. Visual inspection of diffs appears greatly improved in the Desktop 1.0, too. Also, I like that I can one-click clone repos directly from the browser, with the desktop client politely opening when I do so. Foremost being the ability to view pull requests as they get merged into the repository, a process that the desktop client streamlines over the usual GitHub browser interface. There are a couple handy features that I do like, though. Or maybe, like me, you’ll like the desktop app well enough but fail to see how it fits into your own personal workflow. You can try it for yourself, and you’ll like it or you won’t. I won’t waste your time, or mine, with play-by-play description of the UX. And, unlike Slack, when idling in the background the GitHub Desktop 1.0 uses almost zero percent CPU. This seemed a tad excessive, but then Slack - also an Electron app - consumes over 500MB on my machine. The usage did quickly climb to 120MB, but then stabilized. It was a neat little Git client, compact and reasonably swift to start. But, once hands-on with it, found myself pleasantly surprised. There has been the usual hackerchat hatin’ that accompanies anything new, and the word on Desktop 1.0 was that it is slow, bloated, and gobbles RAM like my kid gobbles Pop Tarts. Producing a tool for programmers without Linux support, srsly? It lingered for a day or two on my hard drive, but even über beginner me liked bash better and I’ve never looked back.
(Which I dutifully did, only in those days it was the original Mac-flavored native desktop app). I am not a total n00b to this, since the first time I ever played around with GitHub I basically got played by GitHub in return - the website pretty much steamrolls first-time users into downloading the client.
#Github desktop client download
So I decided to take a look for myself: download GitHub Desktop 1.0 and see what it does. But this is GitHub! Surely its in-house development team must know a thing or two about making an app that could make our work lives better, or easier, or … something. Sure, it was some developers somewhere who labored to bring us utterly useless apps like Man Poke and Human To Cat Translator. But after my initial knee-jerk dismissal of last Tuesday’s announcement, it occurred to me to think for a moment of the developers who worked to build this app. I do not know a single developer who uses the GitHub desktop, old or new. The dev world responded with a collective “yeah, whatevs” shrug and went back to pushing command line code. The new desktop client is a complete overhaul of the original GitHub desktop client, rebuilt from the ground up on Electron, GitHub’s open source framework with the JavaScript backend and the Chromium front end. Last week GitHub launched Desktop 1.0, an app designed as a GUI portage around the CLI workflow favored by the vast majority of GitHub users.
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