> So you are basically saying that a bunch of independent community > members that rely on source code given to them have more technical > knowledge and ability to put out a more polished product than the > actual company that made it and supplies the source code?
Different technical knowledge is needed to make good distro packages. It's common for upstream projects to write technically bad scripts for building and installing their packages and to ignore many issues important for distros (e.g. using other libraries by requiring other packages, not by bundling a version of them in the same package, thus leading to bigger packages and more security problems). Distros like Debian make also useful technical improvements to packages, which wouldn't be quickly merged upstream.
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