You already know the answer to this: if you don't like it, you should fix it! It's open source! In other words, the all too familiar blaming the victim.
It's silly, yes. Especially since there are at least 5 ways of making self-contained, one-file or single-directory distributions of software under Linux. Discord comes as a zip file that you need to unpack, then click on the "Discord" executable - and done. Joplin (my note-taking app choice) uses AppImage, where you download a single file and run it, done. It can be done. Yet, it's not done in the vast majority of cases.
You're not interested in reasons why it's not being widely adopted, so let me just talk to myself. Personally, I'd blame package managers. They are too good, too convenient, to the point that not using them is a real hassle. Those of us who remember the dependency hell won't give up package managers until death do us part. Yet, there are too many of them. Having 3 different pkg managers on a single system (deb, snap, flatpak) is sheer madness.
There's also obsession with dynamic linking combined with reluctance to bundle the required libraries with an app (because updates! we would need to actually track development and test new versions of libraries as they appear, who has time for that?!), and a few other problems. As a whole it's a societal problem that won't go away in the foreseeable future. It's also... not a bad problem to have. It guarantees a heavy push-back against app stores, at least.
You already know the answer to this: if you don't like it, you should fix it! It's open source! In other words, the all too familiar blaming the victim.
It's silly, yes. Especially since there are at least 5 ways of making self-contained, one-file or single-directory distributions of software under Linux. Discord comes as a zip file that you need to unpack, then click on the "Discord" executable - and done. Joplin (my note-taking app choice) uses AppImage, where you download a single file and run it, done. It can be done. Yet, it's not done in the vast majority of cases.
You're not interested in reasons why it's not being widely adopted, so let me just talk to myself. Personally, I'd blame package managers. They are too good, too convenient, to the point that not using them is a real hassle. Those of us who remember the dependency hell won't give up package managers until death do us part. Yet, there are too many of them. Having 3 different pkg managers on a single system (deb, snap, flatpak) is sheer madness.
There's also obsession with dynamic linking combined with reluctance to bundle the required libraries with an app (because updates! we would need to actually track development and test new versions of libraries as they appear, who has time for that?!), and a few other problems. As a whole it's a societal problem that won't go away in the foreseeable future. It's also... not a bad problem to have. It guarantees a heavy push-back against app stores, at least.