With the latest improvements bridging the gap between GitHub.com and GitHub Desktop, you can stay in the rhythm of your work and save time. The two newest features in GitHub Desktop 2.3 surface information from GitHub.com to create a more seamless experience on your desktop. These features reroute you from obstacles when making contributions so that you can do your best work.
First obstacle: I canât push to my branch because I cloned instead of forking the repo and now I canât contribute đ˘
Mixing up cloning and forking can result in a lot of pain, and it can happen to anyone. This includes newer developers who want to start contributing to open source and also seasoned developers who navigate between repositories more than the average person. If you get stuck at the end of this workflow, you shouldnât have to start over or perform âGit magicâ to salvage your work. Thatâs why GitHub Desktop 2.3 informs you when you canât push to a cloned repository and offers to automatically create a fork for you. And it even ports over your work with a single click. Better yet, you no longer need cloning and forking tutorials since itâs now easier for anyone to start contributing to open source with the latest updates.
Now when you recommend GitHub Desktop to a budding developer, theyâll be able to avoid common pitfalls when starting and they wonât need to worry about the difference between a cloned repository and a forked repository.

Second obstacle: I canât push to my branch because I worked on a protected branch đŹ
Weâve heard from developers (including our own!) that itâs common to forget to create a new branch before they start on a new feature or bug fix. Before you know it, youâre 12 commits deep on the master branch, and you canât even commit because that branch is protected. Now you have to use âGit magicâ to move your commits to a new branch. In GitHub Desktop 2.3, if you start making changes on a branch without the right permissions, a warning appears ahead of time so you can create a new branch and continue with the work youâre doing without interruption.

Summing it up
GitHub Desktop is all about making your life easier and helping prevent those âoh noâ moments where youâre stuck and canât easily get unstuck. To do that, we shared the permission-related information from your GitHub repository to your local machine so that we can reroute you when we know you donât have the right permissions. Thatâs two fewer places to get stuck in and two fewer workarounds to memorize.Â
We canât wait to share more ways that weâre using GitHub Desktop to connect GitHub.com to your local machine in the next releases.