What’s the best way to distribute a binary application for Linux?

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I just finished porting an application from Windows into Linux.
I have to create an installer of the application.
The application is not open source => I should distribute the application's binaries (executable file, couple .so files, help files and images).

I found several methods to do it:
- RPM and DEB packages;
- installer in .sh files;
- Autopackage.

I don't like first method (RPM and DEB packages) because I don't want to mantain different packages for different Linux distros.

What is the best way to distribute a binary application for Linux?

software-distribution binary package linux
10 Answers

Today, I would also look at Snapcraft and Flatpak which are embraced by some popular distributions. I explored other options and it is what ended up working best for me. Flatpak in particular also helped me learn about standard Linux desktop conventions to follow.

user_8711190

You may also want to look at AppImage (https://appimage.org/). The concept is that it produces a single binary file that the user downloads, sets executable, and runs directly; no installation necessary, no dependencies to install (since the app image typically includes all the dependencies except basic stuff like glibc). This makes for a really great user experience!

Some downsides:

  • The image may be large, since it probably includes all files/libraries/... the app depends on.
  • As the image creator, you're responsible for security updates to any of the libraries you add into your image.
  • An AppImage is great for a user-run application that's pretty isolated from anything else on the system (i.e. daemons, system configuration, etc.), but if your app relies on things like udev integration, desktop file installation, dbus registration, etc. this isn't easy, since the apps files aren't available when the app isn't running (making udev rules hard), and there is by definition no installer that gets run (making desktop file installation hard).
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