Exactly...

I see the loss of library security updates as the biggest drawback to these vertical bundles. Many of us long-time FOSS users, developers, and sysadmins strongly prefer the distribution model with centralized patch management. It has evolved to address a very important need of the community to balance different integration goals of tens of thousands of developers and millions of users. For 95% of the software I use, if it doesn't exist in my chosen Linux distribution, it doesn't exist for me. The way to get your software to me is to get the attention of the distributors, cajole or employ package maintainers, and get it integrated into the system. Even if we erased the technical packaging/bundling challenges, I'd want this anyway. I want you to pass the basic sanity checks that the distributor imposes to validate that you are a viable project.

Every OSS developer (me included) has a built-in bias to feel that our latest code is the best thing, worth whatever risks or compromises it takes to get it on the system. But in almost every case, OSS releases are really beta software, where the community does much of the QA by accident as they use it. This is inherent to developing software without big commercial budgets. However, most users only have a small number of domains where they should really be a beta tester. And they need to be aware of the risk it reflects on whatever they are actually trying to achieve. Doing that for all the applications on a typical Linux system is just asking for trouble, for an experience of constant bugs and mistrust. I absolutely DO NOT want to disintermediate my consumption of software, leading to hundreds or thousands of independent developers trying to make software update policy decisions for me.

In my 20 years of using Linux, I've noticed prognosticators issue their "big picture" statements and anoint their favorite trends as the indisputable future. They've often seemed pretty myopic, as I've noticed that FOSS evolves a lot more organically than that, due to the myriad interests and motivations of all the contributors. I see that we're happily infusing FOSS Into every space from high-performance computing, to Internet servers, to routers, mobiles, and embedded systems. And this is happening due to real benefits to all the businesses involved, not out of some subversive religious effort. I feel fortunate that I've also been able to use it on workstations and laptops for my entire career. But if "Linux" fades eventually, I feel confident that it will only be because we've shifted our attention to an even more flexible FOSS platform, and it still won't matter if it has been the year of Linux on the desktop, or tablet, etc.