I am on Windows. Pressing the big green button downloads a file that i double-click and it installs Thunderbird.

And Thunderbird could just as well give you a .deb file if you're browsing from Ubuntu or a link to whatever software library your distro uses.

It's not really a Linux thing, it's a Thunderbird thing.

The equivalent would be for Thunderbird to link a .xapp file for Windows users. Good luck installing those by yourself, same with random tar.bz2s.

Of course, downloading random executables is not The Linux Way. I understand the pattern as a holdover from Windows, but it really shouldn't be the way people get taught to install software. Your distro either has a graphical package manager built in that's in control of this type of software (through their native packages or through Flatpak/AppImage/Snap/whatever) that will also keep your software updated.

IMO, distros should come with a "quick start" to explain the concepts of the software store and Thunderbird.net should default to .deb files so most people can just install it the normal way.

The equivalent would be for Thunderbird to link a .zip file for windows users, which is actually a pretty damn common way to distribute software (or at least it use to be) so that you don't need to be an admin to use it, and would have the exact same feature of having random dynamic libraries and stuff like that sitting in the folder.

Is it Ubuntu’s fault that Thunderbird packaged their software in a normal way for Windows and a weird way for Ubuntu?

Yes. They push snap.

Okay, then we're back to Thunderbird not distributing .deb files, which work just like that (ex. Chrome does this).

Except most folks distribute self-extracting archives or an MSI for Windows.

And most people distribute .deb files for Linux.

My experience is that tarballs and RPMs are most common. Regardless there's a lot more diversity in how things are packaged on Linux than on Windows or OSX.

Even if I get a tarball on OSX I can double click on it and then drag the application into the "Applications" directory or run the installer. I'm not sure why this is so challenging on Linux.

Both macOS and windows made the choice to make programs mostly self contained things that can be just dragged in.

Linux distros have a complex network of dependancies, config files, and general crap that requires sophisticated tooling to manage which is different on different distros. All to save a few kb of storage space.

When you download a tarball from the internet containing an application, usually (unless they messed up/don't know what they're doing) that means most if not all dependencies are fully contained in that archive, except for things you can't really do that for, like libc. The point of a tarball is to avoid the system package manager, which makes it easier to reach more distros at the cost of an increased risk it simply won't work on some systems (due to missing system libraries or different versions).

The real reason macOS and Windows are easier to distribute software on is because there's only one Windows and only one macOS. "Linux" is not an operating system, Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, RHEL, etc. are all different operating systems that just so happen to share a kernel and a similar ecosystem of open source software. So compatibility between them is more of a coincidence than anything else.

Luckily nowadays we have Flatpaks and AppImages, which both solve the problem of simplifying app distribution and installation universally for all distros. Although devs will probably get a lot of hate if they only distribute their app as a Flatpak or AppImage and don't also offer tarballs/debs/rpms...so app distribution is likely to remain complicated for a while.

> Even if I get a tarball on OSX I can double click on it and then drag the application into the "Applications" directory or run the installer.

All without opening or requiring the user to open a hideous terminal just to run the app.

> I'm not sure why this is so challenging on Linux.

Desktop Linux fundamentally can never solve this problem. All of the packaging alternatives of alternatives have created a mess and confusion around which distro can open what and not only these alternatives even work out of the box, there is no guarantee that all Linux distros will be supported for that.

At most it is a 'solution' creating a new problem; whist still looking for a problem to solve.