> is there any reason a "simple" .app bundle like has been used on NeXTStep/macOS for decades wouldn't work on Linux? Conceptually no, and both GNUStep and Rox

> is there any reason a "simple" .app bundle like has been used on NeXTStep/macOS for decades wouldn't work on Linux? Conceptually no, and both GNUStep and RoxFiler/RoxOS did just that. The practical reality though was that Linux Desktop has never had a conception of which pieces are 'add-on' and which are 'base-system', and to the extent there was any collection of components that could be part of the latter they were frequently making breaking changes. Combined with no coherent standard for properly versioning libraries and every fiefdom package repo doing its own thing, and what you're left with is decidedly not a platform. The modern version of Rox AppDirs is AppImage, and it mostly kinda works on most distros. This is sad, but there's just no way out of it as long as the Linux Desktop community continues to reject the very concept of being a platform. Steam initially tried to solve this for games by just dragging along its own Runtime for developers to target, but there were still issues. They've since regrouped and basically just declared Win32 the one true stable runtime ABI for games on Linux. FlatPak just decided that yet-another-package-manager was the way to go and manages a collection of explicitly defined runtimes instead. It works well enough for most use cases.