I wish people would interrogate this more deeply: why do we see so many Dockerfiles with random binary artifacts? Why do people download mystery meat binaries from GitHub releases? Why is curl-pipe-to-bash such a popular pattern?
The answer to the questions is that, with few exceptions, distributions are harder to package for, both in first- and third-party contexts. They offer fewer resources for learning how to package, and those resources that do exist are largely geared towards slow and stable foundational packaging (read: C and C++ libraries, stable desktop applications) and not the world of random (but popular) tools on GitHub. Distribution packaging processes (including human processes) similarly reflect this reality.
On one level, this is great: like you, I strongly prefer a distro package when it's available, because I know what I'm going to get. But on another level, it's manifestly not satisfying user demand, and users are instead doing whatever it takes to accomplish the task at hand. That seems unlikely to change for the better anytime soon.
I wish people would interrogate this more deeply: why do we see so many Dockerfiles with random binary artifacts? Why do people download mystery meat binaries from GitHub releases? Why is curl-pipe-to-bash such a popular pattern?
The answer to the questions is that, with few exceptions, distributions are harder to package for, both in first- and third-party contexts. They offer fewer resources for learning how to package, and those resources that do exist are largely geared towards slow and stable foundational packaging (read: C and C++ libraries, stable desktop applications) and not the world of random (but popular) tools on GitHub. Distribution packaging processes (including human processes) similarly reflect this reality.
On one level, this is great: like you, I strongly prefer a distro package when it's available, because I know what I'm going to get. But on another level, it's manifestly not satisfying user demand, and users are instead doing whatever it takes to accomplish the task at hand. That seems unlikely to change for the better anytime soon.