Conda has an .exe installer on Windows and a .pkg installer on macOS. Both signed by Anaconda, Inc. for the OS. There are RPM and deb bootstrap repos for Linux. Then there’s also the .sh shar file installer.

It would be nice to have something like a fusion of conda and apt to work right out of the box on distros like Ubuntu. Like an "apt install --user". I don't understand why we need root rights to install programs that will not need root rights to run anyway. Seems like a huge and obvious oversight to me. I guess it's not a big pain point because in most cases people use their own machines and have root access. Not always the case though in companies or university labs for example.

I have been wondering this for ages. Just last week I had to manually set up KeePass, VSCode, IntelliJ, Guitar (git ui) by manually unpacking tarballs (luckily already built) into ~/bin. Guitar luckily had an AppImage which worked beautifully as a single executable.

For that reason alone I'm a huge fan of AppImage above snaps and flatpaks.