As many others have expressed, third-party RPMs tend to
be done very poorly, Oracle Java is a good bad example. That said, if
it's something a user wants to install on their system, that's their
prerogative, but it's not part of Fedora and shouldn't be. What we could
do is make it easier to install and enable third-party repos, then you
actively have to enable them and supposedly you know what you're doing
(or are blindly following something you found on Google). For me, I use
repos from two providers, Google and RPM Fusion. I think that's pretty
common I add the repos in a script I use for new desktop builds. For
Google I cat out a repo file and for RPM Fusion I pull down their repo
RPM. Being able to dnf install a third party repo would be a cleaner and
I wouldn't mind this approach. I would guess there's no legality
concern because it's just adding a repo file, but that's for the lawyers
to decide.
As far as GUI tools for installing and managing
software. I never use them and I think that's common for "power users".
That said, I could care less what they do, but expect I can have the
same capabilities on the command line, and would expect those
capibilities to be available through DNF.
On
containerization/sandboxing, I see this as useful from a security
perspective, but not for software installation. What I see in the
commercial world with SCL is developers don't even try to make their
software run natively. Instead they pull a ton of libraries/modules into
an SCL environment, package it all in a huge RPM, and then never update
the included libraries. I think it would be more useful to work towards
some sort of automatic sandboxing and decouple that from software
installation.