What is the advantage of PPAs over an apt repo that users place in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/someexternalapp? Is it having a central site that users can search for packages? Basically a social portal?
Having an automated per-user publishing pipeline for packages is a non trivial endeavour.
These days you can get close with github-actions style pieplines and releases, but the PPA system has always been a more complete platform in terms of dependency management.
You can get close with some debian tooling (im a fan of sbuild), but it's some overhead to deal with.
Universe packages are not supported by Ubuntu unless you activate Ubuntu Pro. Thus, if you install ffmpeg on Ubuntu without Pro, it will contain several active vulnerabilities. The full five years only applies packages in the main repo.
I wanted to find another reason to not use Ubuntu for servers (besides Snap being forced on everyone) and this was it.
At least, in Debian, most of the packages I use on my server are from their main repos. Occasionally there are a few from other sources but by the time a new Debian patch is released, those other packages are also updated.
That is also absolutely unchanged compared to "since forever". Canonical supports "main", while "universe" and "multiverse" offer best-effort community support (aka from debian). They now additionally offer a dedicated team for those repos.
Honest question, since the arch wiki seems surprisingly spotty on this: Which arch repos are covered by their security team? Just core? Or also extra? More than that? AUR surely not, right?
Not even "from debian". Sometimes they can't be bothered to copy debian packages that fix security issues if the package is in universe, and just leave it vulnerable for the entire duration of the LTS.
It's not the case for this example of ffmpeg (it's actually not patched), but make sure to check the actual changelog. Sometimes the version is kept, but the patches are backported, so a plain version comparison is not enough.
Ubuntu Pro Shenanigans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38254040 - Nov 2023 (92 comments)