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> The distribution's packagers handle most of this.

And often fuck it up and introduce bugs or even vulnerabilities, intentionally ignore the developer, or simply fail to update packages in a reasonable time frame.

Relying on free labor to package software for you is a terrible terrible idea that helps keep Linux Desktop a shitshow.

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Disagree strongly and as a user I feel distributions and package maintainers are a necessary defense against overly opinionated developers.

I'm glad there is a layer there that will patch and configure to better integrate into the system and in some (very rare) cases remove user hostile "functionality".

Sometimes it's better to trust the developers, not the packagers. Example is the Debian SSH vulnerability from 2008: https://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1576

This was a bug introduced in packaging. See https://lwn.net/Articles/281436/ for more details.

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