(Getting deja vu - apologies if I’m repeating myself here)
We can’t just use the place Anki’s installed, as it may be a read-only location, and it definitely is on macOS & on Linux when installed in a system folder.
From the latest installer/beta, you can use the new option in the tools menu to update to a different release. The old pop-up notifications will also work to update, but they aren’t sent out for every minor update, and certainly not betas.
There are some caveats/surprises. You lose the upgrade/downgrade menu option in older versions, though an add-on could provide that, or you can manually re-run the Windows installer, bump the pyproject.toml mtime, or remove the AnkiProgramFiles folder. And older versions won’t be able to play audio unless mpv is on the path. But this should only be an issue for stable releases made prior to this launcher.
Recent builds require glibc2.36 or later. glibc has no way of targeting older versions, so the glibc you build on is the oldest you can target, and we need a modern-enough one that can also support ARM64 for development.
The launcher is an additional layer. As I covered earlier, distros doing 1 or 2 should only require minor changes, and the launcher is optional.