I realise this thread is ancient, but when you say "programs", if you mean games, then look at DragonRuby:
https://dragonruby.itch.io/dragonruby-gtk/devlog/450794/dragonruby-steam-deck
I haven't used it in a long time, but it was a lot of fun already a couple of years ago.
If you want to use it as something more of a general computer, I'm working on a tool that currently inlines all required files (using Whitequark and Unparser), and next step will be bytecode compiling it, at which point it'd be reasonable easy to produce a binary of it linked to libruby. Will take some time, but will post here when there's something testable.