Programming and Technology

I use Github for almost every programming project, both for work and personal projects. It's a great tool for version management and collaboration, there are of course other Git-based services such as Bitbucket. But Github has always been my favorite, now with unlimited private repositories even if you are a non-paying customer it has become even better.

To work with Github you don't really need a GUI, and more often than not if you are using a IDE such as Visual Studio or JetBrains Rider you will already have a built-in command-line/GUI hybrid tool built in.

With that said, I find that working with a dedicated GUI for Github at times just makes things a bit faster and easier, therefore I've been a user of Github Desktop for a very long time. It should be added that my main dev-setup has been Windows + Visual Studio for the longer part, but nowadays I've moved on to Linux and JetBrains Rider instead.

The good news is that Github Desktop is available on Linux as well for various distros, through this project: https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop

Go with the install instructions for your distro, if you are on a Ubuntu based distro the snap image is probably the easiest way to get started, just open up snap store and search for Github Desktop and install.

However

I've tested the (at the time of writing) latest release 2.1.0 on several Ubuntu-based distros and it's just not working. After installation through the snap store the following error is thrown:

user@user:~$ env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/github-desktop_github-desktop.desktop /snap/bin/github-desktop
/snap/github-desktop/63/app/github-desktop: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgobject-2.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_date_copy

This seems to be a bug that the developers are aware of and should be fixed in the future, until we are in the future the easiest solution for this is to head on over to: https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop/releases/tag/release-2.0.4-linux1 and download the 2.0.4 version (select the .snap package and download).

After downloading run the following in terminal:

snap remove github-desktop
snap install ~/Downloads/GitHubDesktop-linux-2.0.4-linux1.snap --classic --dangerous

Just change the path to where the downloaded file is located on your system.

This installs the 2.0.4 version of Github Desktop that runs without any issues. You can now login to Github through the GUI and start hacking away!