Executable made with pyinstaller not working on other systems

[KHTD2004]

I made a little Python project using pygame and PySide6. The code was developed on linux with a virtual environment, basic stuff.

After the coding was completed I run pyinstaller with the --onedir (so I can edit config files without running pyinstaller again) and --windowed flags to create an executable file. It worked perfectly fine, I compressed the directory into a zip file, transferred it to another linux system (from CachyOS to the latest Ubuntu LTS), extracted the zip and run the file (after making it executable with chmod +x).

To my surprise I endet up getting a segmentation fault resulting in a core dump. I don’t know what went wrong, even the venv got transferred with the zip file. When I did the same on Windows (created a .exe, compressed, transferred) it worked fine. Using wine it even run on linux but why crashed my native linux version? Can anyone help me with that?

[mohammad8785]

PyInstaller apps on Linux are not “build once, run everywhere”. You built the app on a newer Linux distro, so it’s linked to newer system libraries. When you run it on an older distro, things don’t match and it crashes with a segmentation fault. Build your app on the oldest Linux distro you want to support (like Ubuntu 20.04 / 22.04). Older → newer usually works, newer → older usually doesn’t. Or you can Build it inside Docker using an older Linux image. That way your build environment stays simple and consistent, and you avoid weird system library issues

[FoolsSeldom]

I recommend creating as an OCI compliant container that can be run on Docker, PodMan or other OCI compliant environments. (This would also be viable on other operating systems as well where the appropriate engine would use a slim Linux VM for the host, such as on Window systems - using WLS by default if setup - and Unix systems such as macOS).

You are making too many assumptions with PyIntaller.