[WkndTriathlete]

You're doing it wrong. Like way wrong.

Use jlink. It creates a double-clickable .exe from your JDK installation, pared down to a JRE for distribution. Works on Linux and Windows.

[geokon]

could you give me a link on how it's done? I looked into this extensively and there was no way to bundle an .exe . It was a 2-3 years ago so maybe things have changed

[lbalazscs]

jlink only creates a runtime (the parts of the JDK that are actually used by your app), but there's a relatively new command called jpackage for creating installers: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/jpackage/packaging...

EDIT: I see now that you already know jpackage, but you don't want an installer. In that case you can use launch4j, which just wraps a jar in an exe: https://launch4j.sourceforge.net/