[_carbyau_]

This is a great point regarding walled garden vs repositories with respect to choice.

The original point though was implying repositories were better because they are trusted.

However if choice allows trusting a new repository you just came across, choice similarly is fine to trust an .exe from the internet too.

Not advocating for random .exe installing BTW. But honestly, for 99% of what we do we make trust choices based off Reputation and Probability guesses for outcome. We mostly don't have a clue what the executable code will do exactly.

In this case, I have a hunch that a well known repository is likely not to feed me malware. But I also figure that VLC/7-zip/notepad++ probably won't either. So will happily download their .exe. And I don't want anyone removing that option.