We now offer new self-contained polymake binaries which are based on the polymake_jll package built for the OSCAR project. These are ready to run on all reasonable Linux distributions (including ArchLinux, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, Ubuntu, …) and macOS versions:
These include polymake and most required dependencies (including a suitable perl version). You still need to install a C++ compiler, otherwise polymake may not be able to build C++ wrappers on demand, g++ on Linux and Xcode on macOS.
To install these packages just extract the tarball and run ./polymake-4.13-linux-x86_64/bin/polymake (or create a symlink to this file in your $PATH).
Details on the sources for these binaries can be found on the page for polymake_jll and the list of dependencies. This was converted to a self-contained tarball using JLLPrefixes.jl and some custom scripts.