Yes, but the header of the file says it’s a binary, that is why it gives you the option to run as a program or open as a file. Because the OS knows that you can do either with binaries.
What if I don’t want to install it, even if there is a binary in there? What if I just wanna open the archive and see it’s content?
The OS does the smart thing. The header says it’s an archive, so we treat it as just that, an archive. Commercial OSes like Windows and MacOS are the oddballs out, not Linux. It just interprets the cold hard truth - this is an archive, I have no idea what’s in it, you tell me what to do with it, end of story.
I mean, what else would double-clicking a .tar.gz file or an appimage do than install it (yes, I know, look into the archive, but really - how often is that the desired thing to do)?
Personally, I open tarballs quite often. Why? Just wanna know what’s inside them.
Double click translating to install on tar.gz is not wise since anything can be packed in a tarball, a gzip archive or a gzipped tarball.
And then you have a similar problem with tar.xz (it’s becoming more and more popular from what I can see). It doesn’t use gzip to compress the archive, it uses LZMA, so you have to use xz instead of gzip to decompress the tarball.
Basically, it boils down to how UNIX used to work. Mind you, back in the day there were no package managers, it was all done with .tar.zip or make install. This really was hell to be honest… keeping track of what app installed what libraries and versions of it… yes it really was a PITA. This is the real reason why package managers were invented (thank god!) and why having only one package manager on a system is the preferred way to handle apps/software. Otherwise, you’ll soon be in dependency hell. Shared libraries are at the core of any UNIX based OS. Yes, Flatpaks/Snaps/AppImages and package managers like nix circumvent this problem, but in no way is the problem gone. It’s still there, we just don’t mess around with it.
So, basically the idea of having an “installer” came quite late into the game. Plus, having to check on all dependencies and making an install script that worked on every single distro out there was just so complicated, that no one would ever want to go through with it. Sure, there are install.sh scripts in some pacakges out there, but they basically check nothig, it’s more or less “copy this here, that there” which of course could be done by hand anyway… and then run the app and pray it has all of the dependencies it needs 😬… which it never does 😂.
I was once like “🤨… what drugs was I on when I wrote this 🤨”. Comments didn’t help, I must’ve been under the influence of something, it didn’t make any sense.
Hey, I have nothing against people using GUIs to install software. Just don’t say it’s retarded to use a tarball to do the same. After all, everything is done through the terminal (more or less) in UNIX like operating systems. Just because it has a GUI, doesn’t mean that “black magic” commands are not being run in the background.