As a heuristic, I look at the commit dates to see if it’s still being maintained. And lately I look at the commits themselves for evidence of AI use. Then I’ll maybe do a web search for discussions to see what other people/the community has to say about it.

Gnuhealth looks like it may be dead (or at least the repo I found hasn’t had a commit in many years). (Nvm, they moved to codeberg which is a positive signal, IMO).

I look at the number of (hopefully recent) committers and whether they’re human or not.

i look up reviews and rating on alternativeto.net , search it on openhub and sometimes add projects i might be interested it (openhub reports development activity). i sometimes search for reddit for what people say about it.

There are a bunch of websites for user reviews, but honestly i haven’t used them really iirc.

Honestly, popularity. If lots of other people use it, chance are somebody did that sort of check already.