> This isn't a good dichotomy though. Either "Build it from source" or "Wait for a professional 3rd party to package it for you".

Somebody has to do the work. Apparently you won't accept it for that to be the developer, the user, or a "professional third party" (whatever "professional" means here). What exactly do you want?

> Personally I put my support behind flatpak for GUI, mise for CLI/TUI, but it's not a perfect solution and I occasionally bail out to homebrew/linuxbrew.

So third parties. Things that have reinvented "distributions", arguably badly. Are you saying they're not "professional"?

> What exactly do you want?

1. I want it to be easy for developers to publish their own packages. 2. I want it to be easy for users to install these developer-published packages.

> Are you saying they're not "professional"?

I regret using the word professional, I was replying to the claim GP made:

> Packaging it for a distro is someone else's job

Well I (as a developer) want to publish my own software without waiting and hoping someone else will do it for me.

> Somebody has to do the work.

Yes, I (the developer) want to do the work. The whole point of the article is that its painful to do today. I'm interested in how we make the packaging work easier so the developers can do it.

> [...] So third parties

the whole 3rd/1st party question is whether a developer can publish their own package. In most cases they technically can (taps, PRs, flathub, Debian registries, so on) but run into lots of issues along the way.