> It's basically people taking it upon themselves to take other software and repackage it for their distribution. That made some sense 30 years ago when you had

> It's basically people taking it upon themselves to take other software and repackage it for their distribution. That made some sense 30 years ago when you had to install linux from a CD (or floppies) and people necessarily had to package things up to fit on those CDs. That might have been the original reason, but another has emerged in the meantime: distro maintainers are simultaneously unattached enough to the software to make decisions to make for the users instead of the authors and technical enough to actually implement those decisions[1]. OK, no, not really, they also very much implement their own vision of what users should want, but there are (still) enough distros that a user can choose one that fits them once and not be forced to pick or abandon individual programs. In that respect even Flatpak et al make things worse—unsurprisingly, given that Flatpak (AFAIK) is GNOME people saying they should make distro-style decisions, and nobody else should be able to. (Of course, in other respects—such as being able to install arbitrary things from the ’net—Flatpak et al do make things better.) https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....