I want to agree with you that it's important, but also I want to emphasize how hard it is to do any better than just HTTPS. If I have distro maintainers sign t

I want to agree with you that it's important, but also I want to emphasize how hard it is to do any better than just HTTPS. If I have distro maintainers sign the packages they build, then I can avoid keeping their private keys on the package servers. That's cool, and it can make it harder for an attacker to ship evil bits. But there's a bootstrapping problem: How did the user's machine originally learn the packagers' public keys, to know what signatures to look for? It got the public keys that were baked into the installation disk, and that disk was almost certainly downloaded from an HTTPS website, without checking any other signatures. (Or even _with_ extra signatures, if the key fingerprint for those was hosted on the same server.) Compromising the server still lets you own all the users. At the end of the day, running a whole system of offline package signing and key distribution buys you a kind of subtle difference in security: If an attacker owns the package/image server, they can own machines that are set up after that point, but not machines that were set up before. Is that difference worth the effort of maintaining a system like that? Maybe! But it's not really the difference between "secure" and "insecure".