alt Hacker NewsIt's hardly unrealistic - most free software has been packaged, by each distro. Very handy for the developer: just email the distro maintainers (or post on your mailing list) that the new version is out, they'll get round to packaging it. Very handy for the user, they just "apt install foo" and ta-da, Foo is installed.
That was very much the point of using a Linux distro (the clue is in the name!) Trying to work in a Windows/macOS way where the "platform" does fuck-all and the developer has to do it all themselves is the opposite of how distros work.
User now waits for 3rd party "maintainers" to get around to manipulating the software they just want to use from the 1st party developer they have a relationship with. If ever.
I understand this is how distros work. What I'm saying is that the distros are wrong, this is a bad design. It leads to actual bugs and crashes for users. There have been significant security mistakes made by distro maintainers. Distros strip bug fixes and package old versions. It's a mess.
And honestly, a lot of software is not free and won't be packaged by distros. Most software I use on my own machines is not packaged by my distro. ALL the software I use professionally is vendored independently of any distribution. And when I've shipped to various distributions in the past, I go to great lengths to never link anything if possible that could be from the distro, because my users do not know how to fix it.