The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least .deb, .rpm and tarball packages.

In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.

The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls, bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).

Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.

After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.

And that is not enough, if the package needs to call distribution specific tools or access specific paths.

Thanks for the encouragement! I might take another shot at it sometime. I had this server running for about 3 months with just my personal mail, sending probably 1 email per day on average. It's possible slightly higher volume would do a better job of "warming up" the IP.

I self-hosted from about 2007-2008 and 2011-2013, and had nowhere near as much trouble with deliverability. It came as a bit of a surprise how much more difficult it is these days.

If you try again, try to see if you can get a client with a decent sized mailing list. Warming up is usually done with progressively larger sendouts. So you'd start with maybe 500 sendouts, then a thousand, then 3000 etc.

But anyway yeah the barrier to entry has risen really much. It's much harder these days than just a couple of years ago, and it probably won't get easier either!

I was actually hosting on Linode (UK). My hunch was that they would be one of the more reputable networks; I've run small mail servers on them before (2+ years ago) without any problems.

It's a pity there's no easy way (that I know of) to look up the reputation for an entire network block. I'm glad to hear your experience with Linode matches mine.