I made a package for Linux according to itch guidelines, i.e. two versions of executable (x64, x86) and a `launch` bash script which selects a version and sets appropriate LD_LIBRARY_PATH and things. However it's not easy for some users to run it: the problem is that they don't use itch app, they download & unpack .zip manually, and they don't or cannot use command line. So they cannot run the script in Ubuntu: double click just opens it in text editor, despite that it has executable permission. And I don't even see any way to run a bash script in Ubuntu's graphical shell, without touching command line. There's no 'run' context menu command or something like this. I don't want to force users to use command line, what else I can do? :)
Viewing post in How to get your game running in the itch app
Yep, that's the way most Linux distributions behave and it's been annoying third-party developers for years now :(
The only option that I know of is to provide a .desktop file, which will appear as a shortcut and is double-clickable to launch the game. Absolute/relative paths may be an issue there though :(
Thanks for reminding me about .desktop files! Indeed relative paths seem to be not working at all, but there's a workaround (thanks to this SO answer), use %k in Exec line of .desktop file to get path to .desktop file itself, and than extract directory name:
Exec=bash -c "$(dirname %k)/launch"
.desktop file is also better than bare bash script because it may be displayed with custom icon, and even localized name.
UPDATE about icon: looks like relative-path icon is not possible. This time really :(