Installing blender from file

Question

I'm new to Ubuntu, and I want to install blender on Linux from *.tar.xz file I have downloaded from the blender.org, but I just can't make it work. If I install blender from the Repository, it works but it is an older version - 3.6.2. I have noticed that when you install the blender package from the repository, the main files are copied to /usr/shared/blender, the shortcut file - blender.desktop is placed in /usr/shared/applications and the file the execution file is placed in /usr/bin/ so it seems you can't just uncompressed the *.tar.xz to /usr/local/blender and double click the shortcut file, yet the instruction for installing on Linux, on Blender.org are to uncompressed it to usr/local/.

I have 2 questions but they might be interrelated:

1. What should I do to make version 4 installed from the downloaded file it work by clicking on the shortcut file, like it works when I install blender from the repository?
2. Even the version I installed from the repository will not run from the Terminal with ./blender, or /usr/bin/blender, even though it does run by double clicking /usr/bin/blender file, or the blender.desktop file, so it is not missing dependencies, so if I want to run it from Terminal with command line, what should I do?

Answer 1

TL;DR

Run these commands after extracting blender in /usr/local:

#!/bin/sh
mv /usr/local/blender-* /usr/local/blender # Recommended
sudo ln -s /usr/local/blender/blender-launcher /usr/bin/blender
ln -s /usr/local/blender/blender.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/

Explanation:

The first recommended step is to rename the extracted folder which has the version and architecture in its name by default, the most common name to use is just blender:

mv /usr/local/blender-* /usr/local/blender

Second: Create a symbolic link that targets to the blender-launcher script which is delivered along with blender, this script will prepare some environment variables so blender can be executed even if you are located in different folders, given that /usr/bin is in the $PATH variable. You need root permissions to write it in the /usr/bin folder.

sudo ln -s /usr/local/blender/blender-launcher /usr/bin/blender

Third: In order to let know your application launcher about the existence of blender, you need to copy or link the .desktop file inside ~/.local/share/applications/ or either /usr/share/applications/, but the second one requires root permissions, so I'd just use the first one:

ln -s /usr/local/blender/blender.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/