It evidently isn't working well enough - why are snap and flatpak a thing at all if source packages are good enough? Why do users want programs to get picked up as part of a distro's repositories?
As user, I want application to be tested and integrated with my distro by a competent maintainer. As application developer, I want to deliver latest version of my application to all users without additional testing, integration, and discussions with maintainers of all Linux distributions.
> As user, I want application to be tested and integrated with my distro by a competent maintainer.
Do you though? Most users just want the latest upstream release, packaged up so they don't have to deal with compiling or dependency management themselves (and have a chance of a clean uninstall), not any extra testing or integration. Hence the popularity of PPAs, Snap/FlatPak, etc..
Most users just want the properly working latest upstream release, which just works from the first try. It means that somebody must properly recompile, test, fix bugs, integrate, and package the software package into existing distribution. Fedora often publishes even pre-release versions of some software packages, if you want to talk about "latest" version.
> It means that somebody must properly recompile, test, fix bugs, integrate, and package the software package into existing distribution.
Recompile, yes. The rest, probably not - upstream usually does that better than any distro. Distro-specific bugs are usually caused by that distro's changes made to "integrate" the package into the distro, which are usually not something the user wants. Again, hence the popularity of PPAs and Snap/FlatPak.
> Fedora often publishes even pre-release versions of some software packages, if you want to talk about "latest" version.
Fedora has the resources to do that because they're managed by a huge company, and they're big enough that upstream will likely make changes to accommodate them. Most distros aren't on that level.
