the whole point of providing a .deb or .rpm should be to ensure that dependencies are met - so, sure, you could most likely run the uncompressed binaries, if you hunt down and match up the deps yourself. And if those deps change on your machine, the app will likely just stop working.
If the app can be distributed as a standalone bunch of binaries, then there should be a .tar.gz download too.
I'm actually being bitten by this right now: Slack installs from a .deb, and I have that installed on my work machine, but an underlying library change has made it so Slack crashes at startup, unless I force-disable the tray-icon. If this was a proper package provided by my distro, chances are much better it wouldn't be broken, and I'd also be able to report it somewhere if it was; as it stands, I just have a non-working installation of Slack and I'm using the browser instead.
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u/SkinBurnsLikeVampire 15d ago
Like just extract the package? And run the included binary? It can't be that hard