@jk "tamagotchi mode" is a perfect description of why I switched from Arch to Debian many years back. I inherited the very active "set everything up yourself" attitude from arch, but applied it to a distro that has stability. But I also don't run a full desktop (so i have no idea how broken stuff like icons is), and it didn't solve this problem, just mitigate it
@jk it's a shame the linux ecosystem doesn't have room for "folders full of DLLs and EXEs" consistently working, too many weird assumptions about where stuff should be on a system. In theory /opt provides some clues how to do this, I think you could make a folder with bin, lib, share, whatever subdirectories and have a script that sets some environment variables?
This problem is why appimage is the most promising of the newfangled packaging stuff out there, to me at least, even if it's a hack
@jk oh wow this is great
@jk like rly I wish more stuff could just be statically linked and just have self contained executables that can run anywhere, but I appreciate that this is so fucking hard that we came up with a whole wrapper to set up a virtual filesystem to dynamically link shit in from to work around this.