Novice-friendly download links for Mac

[smangham]

Feature description

Not really a feature request but for accessibility.

We teach a lot of PhD students and postdocs version control and want to get them using GCM. However, many of them aren't from a software development/tech background, and pre-course prerequisites that point them at the Releases list and say "Install the right release for your architecture" are a thing a lot of them will bounce off, and lead to them not attending the course.

Just making a little GitHub Pages site that updates when you create a new release and has something like:

Download for Mac: 
* Apple Silicon (M1/M2)
* Older Macs

or including that text in the actual Release message would make it a lot easier for novices. (Edit: Direct links to the Windows and "Ubuntu (.deb)" installers would help too, really. Aware obvs the .deb isn't Ubuntu-specific but that'll be distro of most novice Linux-users who're more comfortable with GUIs)

Completely understand if the answer is "Users who're not sure about the difference between x64 and ARM64 should probably just stick to GitHub Desktop" though. We see a lot of early-career researchers who're trained in a handful of command-line tools that their field depends on but don't have a very deep understanding beyond that, but I appreciate that might not be a sufficiently large audience for you.

[rimrul]

Download for Mac:

• Apple Silicon (M1/M2)
• Older Macs

I'm not convinced most people who struggle with determining wether their mac has an ARM64 CPU know wether their CPU is an Apple Silicon CPU. Maybe something like a link to https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211814 would be more helpfull.

That being said, the recommended install method on macos is via homebrew, which would take care of this problem automatically from my understanding.

[smangham]

Fair, my thought was it's a marketing buzzword they're more likely to have heard. M1/M2 is probably enough.

Yeah, we'd prefer to get people using Homebrew, but we can't count on novices having it. Basically every prerequisite step for an Intro to Research Software course that includes "Copy-paste this code you don't understand into the terminal" tends to hit attendance rates for people without programming backgrounds - it's a bit of a bootstrapping problem. One of the major reasons to use GCM is that allowing people to authenticate with a password via a browser window rather than using an SSH key or personal access token is a lot more accessible.