I feel super dumb asking this. But what actually is and how does github (or similar sites) work? Are they all just source files one needs to manually compile? I am always confused when I look at a github page. I know some have directions but they still go way over my head sometimes. Im not a total noob but some of this stuff seems like you need to be in programming and have an IDE just to run a program.
GitHub is a site that hosts git repos. Git is primarily for source code, but you can put just about any kind of project in it.
Most of them will have precompiled releases.