For packages like Kubernetes or big data packages one should not use anyone else's builds. I have been finding problems in Cray's modules and eventually we are using our own builds we can reproducibly support using Spack.
I would say for any piece of software, if the vendor themselves provide a package for your distro, use that, not the distro version.
In fact I’ll go a step further and say Windows and macOS got this right, in that third party developers should do the work to “package” their apps.
It would be insane for Microsoft to maintain packages for every piece of software that ships on Windows, but somehow that’s the situation we’re in with Linux.
> It would be insane for Microsoft to maintain packages for every piece of software that ships on Windows, but somehow that’s the situation we’re in with Linux.
And this is why installing ex. Filezilla on Linux is safe and easy, and doing the same on Windows is neither.
In fact I’ll go a step further and say Windows and macOS got this right, in that third party developers should do the work to “package” their apps.
It would be insane for Microsoft to maintain packages for every piece of software that ships on Windows, but somehow that’s the situation we’re in with Linux.
Hopefully Snap or Flatpak changes this!