This was in 2006. 2006. And people still have to dig back to then to make this point.

In 2006 the security landscape was very different. The common understanding of security being a tremendously subtle issue was much, much lower. A typical system from 2006 was much more trivially exploitable than one today. A lot of things can be said about security attitudes in 2006 vs now.

My experience when I worked on upstream open source software was that distribution package makers would routinely introduce subtle bugs into programs via the act of packaging. In fact on the project I worked on we stopped supporting users who didn't use our own upstream packages because the number of bugs introduced by downstream packagers was just so huge.

I can't see any real benefits to the Linux approach and never could. It's one of the reasons I ended up moving to macOS. There's hardly any malware there too and yet app developers build packages themselves.