What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since I prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years. [0] https://appimage.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago

There is AppImage[1], which packs a lot of stuff into a SquashFS filesystem, appends it to the executable, so everything is in one file. [1] https://appimage.org. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago

Nah I think yall just hating appimage. Real gold standard. Source: 11 months ago

Although I haven't used plugins feature myself yet, this does sound like the perfect use case for them. Not every patient needs to access every single source. With plugins you can load only the source (or few sources) that they actually need. You can still use something like https://appimage.org/ to give them "a single binary", but will actually contain your slim binary and all the plugins. Source: 11 months ago

Like bauh which supports AppImage, Arch packages (including AUR), Debian packages, Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications. Source: 12 months ago

If you really want a GUI package manager that doesn't break EndeavourOS, I've had a good experience with bauh when I started using EOS. But I also do everything with yay now, as others have suggested, it is more convenient once you know the commands. Source: over 1 year ago

Lastly, deb-get + pacstall + bauh. All of these combined covers 99% of my software needs, much less need to find and install PPAs and .deb manually. Still not as convenient as AUR, but much better than it was before. Hopefully, eventually everything is on Flatpak, snap, or AppImage so I could just use Bauh for most apps, but for now, I'm glad that these tools exists. Source: over 1 year ago

Is it an AppImage? Did you make it executable? If you use a lot of AppImages then you may want to add DE integration via their utility. I do not use it, as it runs a backgroudn daemon, I prefer using bauh instead. Source: over 1 year ago

You can use bauh. Supports AppImage, Arch packages (including AUR), Debian packages, Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications. GitHub. Source: almost 2 years ago