So they should just call it 'push'. The word 'sync' is not in the Git terminology.

In its defense, git terminology is stupid. It took me way too long to reason out what the fuck a pull request meant. To your starting developer it seems to indicate the opposite of what it does.

The GitHub desktop client is very limited and seems mostly geared toward a lone developer or small team who has never used git before. In this context I think it's a reasonable decision to use a more common verb.

Nope. That does no one any good. Using git verbage would, at the very least, acclimate them to very common terminology used by the rest of the folks they will eventually encounter.

Well, I disagree, because the alternative for many is probably no source control.

Folks writing production crap would opt for no source control? Well, fair enough I guess. But I (and probably most competent sw engineering folks) would never hire someone who was completely oblivious to using source control. So hopefully that 'practice' would die through attrition.

You've got to meet people where they are. Someone who is familiar with how git works is going to find the git GUI client way too limiting to seriously consider using it, whatever verb they use for the push function.

So it never pulls updates on the remote? That seems like pretty unexpected behaviour.

It pulls and then pushes, I guess I should say, but I was considering "pulls and..." part of the push operation.