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 / 3 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 / 9 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

Have a look here. Did you not search for the answer? That's part of the Arch(based) ethos. We tend to like to learn by reading whatever is required. :). Source: about 1 year ago

I was also looking for something nicer for Arch, but haven't found anything as nice as Nala. For now, I switched to pikaur, which at least displays updates in a much clearer way. Source: almost 2 years ago

Nice, but this definately needs a dependency resolver, otherwise it can only install a fraction of the available AUR packages. Since you're already using python, you may adapt your whole code on top a another python-based AUR helper like pikaur. You maybe also could take at the dep resolver of my ABS project. It's python, too, maybe not as clean as pikaur's code but simpler and not too integrated. Source: over 2 years ago

I've been using pikaur ever since pacaur became abandonware and I'm very happy with it, can't recommend it enough. Sure, it's not implemented in Rust or Go so it's certainly not as cool as yay or paru but that doesn't really matter much to me, being an end user. I don't really care as long as it does its job, as advertised. Source: about 3 years ago