I think the above posters covered it well, but I'll add one more thing:
If you're coming from Windows, you might be familiar with a zip
file. A tar.gz
file is similar to a zip
file: it's a compressed archive of files. It is not really equivalent to an exe
file on Windows.
Windows is a fairly homogeneous system, so it's possible to directly deliver an exe
file. On Linux, we tend to leverage shared libraries more (rather than package them with executables) and so it really depends on the system you're deploying the application to. That's why they typically provide a tar.gz
file, which is either a compiled executable (like exe
) along with all the shared library files you might need; or it's the source code, in which case you need to compile it yourself and leverage the shared libraries on your system (and install any ones that you might not already have). As others mentioned, look for a README file in either case.