[pdonis]

> there's no reason to trust the competence of Canonical or RedHat employees (or even volunteers for other distros) over those of Apple or Microsoft.

Yes, there is: Apple and Microsoft have broken people's systems, and leaked their data, multiple times. Microsoft has even shipped virus infected CD-ROMs to customers. RedHat and Canonical have not done those things. So their track record is much better.

> It doesn't stop at PPA, to really support all the other picky Linux guys with their distributions I need to...

You only need to do all that stuff if you insist on providing your own binaries. But the whole point of each distro having its own packaging system is that the distro builds the binaries and packages them. You, the upstream developer, just provide your open source code.

> Personally, the amount of times that this "packaging and updating infrastructure" has broken working applications or whole Linux installations leads me to believe that no amount of testing will ever make it work reliably.

I've never had this problem, so we apparently have had very different experiences.