Daemon Silverstein

.sh files for installation: idk why these are used, they’re just annoying. a lot of proprietary software from corpos use them (probably so they can verify dependencies themselves and not trust the system)

GOG (Good Old Games) distributes the games using a .sh file containing all the binaries and assets needed for the game. It’s strange to think of, but the binary data coexists with textual shellscript instructions, thanks to the exit instruction (which ensures that the shell won’t try to interpret the binary data) alongside some awk/grep/tail wizardry to extract the binary data from the current shellscript.

It’s probably because .sh can run in any distro, because every distro has a shell interpreter. Also, they don’t need to be compiled (differently from .appimage, for example), it’s just a merge of a .sh and a binary archive (possibly .tar.gz).