As an end-user who's barely involved in packaging anything, i strongly disagree with your point. On free systems, installing a package can either be super easy (apt install from official repos) or harder and you have to read instructions.
It is harder to install software that has not been reviewed/vetted (yet) and as a user i believe that's a very good thing. That's the only reason out of the many non-technical GNU/Linux users i know, i've never even once seen a virus like i have seen the same people get on Windows/Mac.
"Download & run" untrusted code from the Internet is very much an anti-pattern for security. I'm really glad AppImage exists for some usecases (as it does support PGP signatures for releases), but i'm really glad it's not the go-to method for releasing software.
Also worth noting, there's exactly one reasonably-secure alternative to distro packages, and that's GNU/guix, another distro inspired by nix but with much higher security standards (bootstrappability, "channel introductions", etc). Maybe some day our distros will be packaged with GNU/guix and a GNOME Software (or equivalent) backend for graphical usage?
It is harder to install software that has not been reviewed/vetted (yet) and as a user i believe that's a very good thing. That's the only reason out of the many non-technical GNU/Linux users i know, i've never even once seen a virus like i have seen the same people get on Windows/Mac.
"Download & run" untrusted code from the Internet is very much an anti-pattern for security. I'm really glad AppImage exists for some usecases (as it does support PGP signatures for releases), but i'm really glad it's not the go-to method for releasing software.
Also worth noting, there's exactly one reasonably-secure alternative to distro packages, and that's GNU/guix, another distro inspired by nix but with much higher security standards (bootstrappability, "channel introductions", etc). Maybe some day our distros will be packaged with GNU/guix and a GNOME Software (or equivalent) backend for graphical usage?