Keybase uses root privileges only for making the magic /keybase directory available, where you can access your KBFS files (the redirector allows different users on the same system to see their own files). Keybase and KBFS run as unprivileged daemons (via the systemd user manager where available).
As giancarlostoro mentioned, you can unpack the .deb file and run the binaries out of there. If you put the binaries in your $PATH, you can even symlink the systemd unit files to your ~/.config/systemd/user and use the systemd user manager to manage your custom Keybase install. Note that the KBFS mount will not be accessible at /keybase, but instead at another location writable by your user (see https://keybase.io/docs/linux-user-guide#configuring-kbfs).
Finally, our build script at https://github.com/keybase/client/blob/master/packaging/linu... builds all components and assets without root and lets you handle the packaging and install after that.
If you have questions or more custom use cases, feel free to join the keybasefriends team to talk about it or make a GitHub issue!
https://signal.org/android/apk/
With Keybase we currently have to resort to shady APK sites.
Let me know (I'm the Keybase user modalduality) if you have anything else to add or any questions. Cheers!
Maybe the chat application should be extracted into a separate more native application maybe since another "problem" I see my friends talking about is that it is too slow.
Packages don't run the software they install unless it installs a daemon or something.
I don't know enough about Linux to verify that the Keybase package does everything right; I delegate that to the Debian packagers and don't install anything as root unless it's from the Debian package repositories. Any software that I need that isn't in the distro is installed to a folder inside my home folder, where it might conflict with other custom installed software, but at least it won't break the entire system.
I've built my own Debian packages at work, but I'm not a total guru yet. I've never ran into issues with KeyBase yet on Linux, but honestly you could always open up a GitHub issue with your concerns to find out.
Edit:
Best I can tell from their github they install KeyBase to /opt/keybase specifically, or at least the main stuff, which is what third party packages usually do.