There actually is/was two standards for this in Linux: GNUStep Application Bundles[0] and ROX-Filer AppDirs. Currently AppImage is trying to keep the dream alive, but it bundles the files in a squashfs image attached to the executable.

[0] Which of course came from NeXT Application Bundles, which is also where OSX Application Bundles came from.

AppImage does pretty much that out of the box.

AppImages are so good. They 'just work'. They're super easy to build and distribute too. I think more Linux distributions should embrace them as the de-facto app standard to replace snap and flatpak.

BeOS/Haiku appends assets to the end of the ELF file with a ToC and some easy-to-use APIs for accessing them.

I always wish that’d taken off.

I guess AppImage isn’t dissimilar in that it appends a squashfs image to be mounted with FUSE.

Windows also does this. Linux doesn't, preferring to KISS because with demand paging there's really no reason you can't just put them in your rodata section.