AppImage and Gear Lever are good ways to install Linux software.

AppImage is a portable application format. You download a single executable file that has everything needed to build a little environment to run the program. Shared libraries, data files, the executable, etc all invisibly accounted for. It’s remarkably old technology, dating to 2004. It works great.

Gear Lever is a tool for managing AppImages. I use it under KDE Plasma, when I download a new AppImage I open it with Gear Lever. That installs it somewhere permanent and creates shortcuts to launch it in my KDE environment. It’s quite usable, the only complexity in the GUI is stuff to manage autoupdates. Those work great but can be a little complicated to configure manually. (You shouldn’t have to, the AppImage can specify its own update mechanism.)

There’s several other approaches to portable, distribution-agnostic Linux software. Flatpak is quite popular but I’m not a fan. Mostly because Flatpak wants to run the binaries in a sandbox and that causes a lot of friction. (See Flatseal for a tool for that). Also Bazaar, the Flatpak management GUI I use, is really buggy. The Flathub app repo / store is also very slow.

Gear Lever + AppImage is a really nice experience. It’s now my primary choice when installing complex new apps that I don’t want to just install with Fedora’s RPM/DNF.