It might happen with time, though is not needed (also people wouldn’t be able to rely on it for “Linux” until more than one, maybe many Linux distros would have preinstalled). You might be interested in: [ANN] AppBundler.jl - Bundle Your Julia GUI Application
Linux and other operating systems need Python for itself, i.e. some scripts (historically done differently, with bash or perl or awk etc.), but having such an option is mostly important for one language, they default to, and that’s it has fast startup for scripts, i.e. are NOT compiled at runtime like with Julia (though Julia also has an interpreter option, it’s just slower than Python, while it’s startup relatively fast).
Historically Linux/Unix has included many shells such as bash, and perl, and by now python, but not not all Linux do, e.g. Arch doesn’t have python (by default, it had Python 2, i.e. up to 2.5.1 seemingly only, then yes, Python3 now available but NOT preinstalled). You can still make Python apps for Arch, without it preinstalled, I don’t know how you do it exactly, your app install just needs to install Python too as one of its dependencies, and Julia could it the same way too. It’s though a bit annoying how many ways there are to install in different Linux distros, and it would be nice to know of one way that works on all, e.g. used the Ubuntu Julia snap where available by installing it for you, and differently elsewhere.
You do have Julia available as a snap, e.g. for Ubuntu: Install julia on Linux | Snap Store but yes you need to install it. [And I would rather want that the julia snap (and/or not yet available snap juliaup) would install juliaup, not julia directly.]
You CAN install the Julia snap on Arch and Fedora, but there you can’t rely on snap itself (i.e. snapd) so you you first need to install snapd. On Linux Mint, that I use it doesn’t have snap, and decided against it, while there’s a workaround to enable it:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snap-on-linux-mint
You also do have latest Julia available directly in Arch to install with this (without snap):
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/julia-bin
For some reasons it has some dependencies such as:
- llvm (llvm-rocm-gitAUR, llvm-gitAUR, llvm-minimal-gitAUR)
- python (python37AUR, python311AUR, python310AUR)
I’m not sure why, would like to know, and for LLVM, Julia has historically bundled it’s own (making it larger, also because they patch it), I wouldn’t truest distros to bundle Julia if not exactly the same e.g. switching out LLVM for some other version of it.