[dTal]

Meh. I don't think it's technically difficult to just ship binaries that work on any distro, as it's incredibly common - Firefox, Blender, Arduino, Cura all manage it just fine. Mostly they just come as a tarball you unpack, occasionally you get an AppImage so you don't even need to do that. Technically it all works fine. But the Linux world still holds a cultural aversion to running mystery binaries, echoing from a time when the sense of battle against proprietary software was felt more keenly than it is today. Expecting people to run binaries they didn't compile was considered rude and antithetical to core values; distros being the only authorized exception. Even today, attempts to dislodge the distro as the official distributor of binaries are met with controversy and suspicion.

[aulin]

I've been working with Linux since more than 20 years and I don't recall any cultural aversion against binaries, at least the ones shipped by your distribution.

Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users.

What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries.

But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.

[dTal]

We agree; distros are/were the anointed compilers and distributors of binaries. No distro would ever include an upstream-compiled binary in their official repositories, even if it worked perfectly well and had no dependencies.

[halikular]

Yeah tarballs works fine. I know that at least AUR use mostly upstream unmodified tarballs.