I believe most projects that serve debs from their own download page do not try to package for each distro separately, and instead opt to package up requirement

I believe most projects that serve debs from their own download page do not try to package for each distro separately, and instead opt to package up requirements as needed. I can't comment deeply on deb vs rpm, it is kinda disappointing that we have this split, and I don't know if there's a great way to merge it back. Mac does have a good distribution story. This also exists on Linux in the form of app images. The one missing piece is that Mac has the Applications convention. AppImageLauncher[0] solves this, but really it would be good for Gnome/KDE to just integrate this concept. That gives the (important!) "have the application show up in the application launcher" option. I do not believe one could qualify Windows programs as being distributed as a single binary. A single installer, perhaps! But many Windows programs dump files all over your file tree to do things, and then goes to touch stuff in your registry. There's a reason we have "portable executables" for windows as its own download option! [0]: https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher