wixsharp VS AppImageKit

I can recommend Wixsharp (https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp), you no longer have to learn the insane wix xml syntax to create an installer.

Also try wix# (https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp) - it makes things much easier

Windows: The Microsoft-recommended way is .msi files but, if you're not willing to pay for something like InstallShield or a professional "How to use WiX XML course", making them is going to be painful even with something like WiXSharp, so my advice is to offer a Zip file and an Inno Setup installer. (Which things like Chocolatey can build on)

Wix# is better, but still not as easy, and it depends on .NET, which makes it a hassle to get set up in Wine compared to how, being written in Delphi and using itself as an installer, Inno Setup is practically Rust-like in how easy it is to set up in Wine.

If you really want to bundle a compiler, my advice would be to just use an installer like Inno Setup or NSIS or the WiX Toolset via WixSharp and have it either download or bundle the installer for the compiler.

Speaking of MSI, I'd suggest using Wix# instead of WiX directly.

The functionality in the msilib module is somewhat low-level anyway (it basically just opens the database for you and leaves the arcane incantations required for doing anything as an exercise for the reader) so it probably wouldn't be hugely difficult to replace it with ctypes calling msi.dll directly.

If I were to replace my msilib-based installer, I would migrate to Wix# [1], a fantastic high-level wrapper for WiX that lets you express your installer in a few lines of C# (and then generates the thousands of lines of XML that WiX needs, but you don't need to touch it). I wouldn't have used msilib if I had known about Wix# at the time.

[1] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

Adding that folks should look into using WixSharp especially if there is a need to create a more customizable UI for the installer. The instructions for building the installer is all written in C# including any custom actions required by your installer project.

What you're looking for sounds like AppImages (https://appimage.org/) . I have only used them while downloading games from itch.io, etc. (since i prefer package managers) but they seem to work out of the box on popular distros.

Ideally a new instance of the application is installed for each user. This also provides better isolation if one user upgrades/removes/breaks their application instance. I, for one, have really come around to the AppImage model [0] in the last couple of years.

[0] https://appimage.org/

I found a similar issue on github and tried this solution but still getting the same error .

There is AppImage[1], which packs a lot of stuff into a SquashFS filesystem, appends it to the executable, so everything is in one file.

[1] https://appimage.org

Nah i think yall just hating appimage. Real gold standard.

Although I haven't used plugins feature myself yet, this does sound like the perfect use case for them. Not every patient needs to access every single source. With plugins you can load only the source (or few sources) that they actually need. You can still use something like https://appimage.org/ to give them "a single binary", but will actually contain your slim binary and all the plugins.

```dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2 AppImages require FUSE to run. You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage if you run it with the --appimage-extract option. See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE for more information```

This doesn't look like a squashfs image. Cannot mount AppImage, please check your FUSE setup. You might still be able to extract the contents of this AppImage  if you run it with the --appimage-extract option.  See https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE  for more information open dir error: No such file or directory

appimages. Appimages are similar to flatpaks, exept that they are a file you download and double click to run. Think of them as portable softwares like windows has (portable apps). They are sandboxed too. You can learn more about appimages here