No, but packaging a software package for every Linux distro that exists is unfeasible. Not that I care though, I don't run commercial software. But, you know, devil's advocate and all that. Still, I completely understand why someone might be frustrated by the way software is usually installed in Linux if they were, say, a game developer.
99% of software packed for Debian will just work with any of the derivatives. No idea how it looks like on the RPM side, but as long as your distro is new enough, 3rd party software packaged for Ubuntu usually works on Debian and 3rd party software packaged for Debian near-always works on derivatives.
Yes, packaging a software package for every Linux distro _is_ unfeasible, but have you ever used Linux? There are snaps, flatpaks, and AppImages, which can all run in any distro, and are generally more secure than "native" packages (for lack of a better word).
A technology superseded by Flatpaks, yet pushed incessantly by Canonical, a befuddling move that I still don't quite understand. Rough to use in any other distro.
> AppImages
Speaking from experience, these don't run on every distro. So they fail to fulfill their intended purpose. As far as I'm concerned, that makes distributing software as AppImages a no-go.
> Flatpak
Better than any of the technologies previously quoted, but it is not without it's own issues. The chances of a Flatpak working on any particular distro are acceptably high, but they still suffer from the same problem AppImages do. I've had an instance were a an app refused to run on OpenSUSE, even though it was working completely fine on Fedora (I was using Flathub's repo on both distros, I wasn't using Fedora's, just to clarify). I think it was Firefox, though I'm not 100% on that.
Still, I'm yet to see a commercial software being distributed as a Flatpak. My guess is that it's all more of a hassle than it is worth. Which, I guess you could say that about packaging commercial software for Linux in general. So, we're back to square one with the chicken and the egg problem that Linux suffers from. Though nowadays it's less severe what with the existence of SteamOS and all of that, so at least there is a substantial marketshare, small as it is.
How do you define "commercial software"? Spotify, Zoom, Steam, Discord, Postman, IDEA Ultimate, and lots of other end-user software that is built by companies and where people pay for things (i.e. commercial software?) is available through Flathub.
Most commercial software in general can be downloaded as a free demo version and then activated with a license key or account, and that model works really well with Flatpak and even Flathub.
Assuming this is a commercial vendor not available through your package manager, and that you must go to the website, pay and get a download link (with source in this scenario), how is this fundamentally different to a Windows user paying for and downloading something bundled with malware?
Were Linux to go mainstream, it'd be unrealistic to ask users to vet the source code! Who has the time and expertise? You fundamentally rely on others to tell you it's safe. On Linux it's a safe bet, since malware authors are less interested in targeting it.
