Its better to still clone from github. Although one may be independent of the other. The clone will keep all the necessary files in the directory Homestead that you clone.

i didnt do the cloning, i just added the vagrant box and my homestead is working fine.. in my opinion it is an alternative step

I first added the vagrant box, and couldn't get Homestead to work (error after error) - I suppose I could have worked through them, but I wanted to first understand if I was interpreting the documentation correctly. This is still a question, as the docs are a little ambiguous here.

Secondly, I cloned the repo, and that worked.