Setting aside that those developers are not good team players / open source citizens, they always have the option to ship a regular tarball with everything inside, a la Blender / Firefox / VSCode / Arduino etc...
I resent having to install and maintain another package manager, and another set of base runtime libraries. I won't do it. Give me standalone binaries, give me source that compiles, but don't give me a link to some third party app store thingy.
Indeed. This seems like a tooling issue, and one that strikes me as more worthy of community attention than reinventing the package manager for the nth time.
Perhaps. Extrapolating the idea that .tar.gz application packages should be standalone, a better system than an external updater might be that the aforementioned build tooling includes an "update" script inside the .tar.gz. Then the user can run them at their own convenience. This is similar to how Firefox's updater works, except Firefox itself does double duty as the update script.
>Setting aside that those developers are not good team players / open source citizens
...yeah, no.
Open sourcing your code doesn't mean you necessarily want people packaging it up for distribution elsewhere, because when they inevitably fall behind the release schedule and people get on old versions, you are often the one who gets the support triaging work. It is entirely reasonable to not want other people doing this.
I resent having to install and maintain another package manager, and another set of base runtime libraries. I won't do it. Give me standalone binaries, give me source that compiles, but don't give me a link to some third party app store thingy.