Speaking of the development branch: after tons of changes to the build system and everything, portable builds just landed! GitLab will now be creating one for each commit, so you can go to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-commander/-/artifacts, pick some create_portable job and click the download button. Unpack the file you download and run gnome-commander binary inside – it will just work, without any installing. Your settings are also being kept inside, in the settings/settings.ini file.
Artifacts · GNOME / gnome-commander · GitLab

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We will be providing portable builds for future releases of course, starting with Gnome Commander 2.2.

Decoupling various Gtk mechanisms from the operating system wasn’t easy but so far it seems to work nicely. I’m only aware of one issue: generic application icon. It is my understanding that this cannot be helped without modifying state outside the application directory.

And the portable builds just got a little bit… well, more portable. Our plugins depend on some Python modules, and these modules are now being packaged into the portable builds. So plugins now work out of the box without requiring any changes to the system.

We still depend on system libraries however (essentially Gtk and libvte). It seems that libvte in particular might not be pre-installed. The builds now contain a README file explaining this and listing the distribution packages to install.

Concerning those system libraries: libvte has been an issue for the portable builds so far, the other required libraries being pretty much universally available. So I’ve now managed to package libvte with the portable builds, this should significantly increase the chances of the portable builds just working out of the box.