Yeah, packages for things like Blender and Steam do exist in most distro repositories. But they make no distinction between packages that provide software like that and packages that provide core OS services + userland (systemd, pipewire, coreutils, cups, a desktop environment, and so on). What you want requires a distinction between those things.
See SteamOS, Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite + universal-blue, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa, Endless OS, and possibly in future Ubuntu Core Desktop as examples of modern systems (or systems in development) that make use of traditional packages as the building blocks of the base OS, and then lean on application distribution methods like Flatpak or Snap to provide desktop software. Use of the distro package manager for software like Blender is explicitly discouraged by all of these.
Distro specific fixes and configurations shouldn’t be necessary as long as the OS provides what the application platform needs (desktop portals, audio server, display server, print server, message bus, etc) Flatpak doesn’t even prevent distro specific repositories if it’s really necessary either; Fedora ships with their own Flatpak repository in addition to Flathub.
You want better control of or isolated and relocatable end-user software installation, and it already exists - it’s just not being done at the traditional package manager level, and I haven’t heard about any development effort going towards changing that.
Yeah, packages for things like Blender and Steam do exist in most distro repositories. But they make no distinction between packages that provide software like that and packages that provide core OS services + userland (systemd, pipewire, coreutils, cups, a desktop environment, and so on). What you want requires a distinction between those things.
See SteamOS, Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite + universal-blue, openSUSE Aeon/Kalpa, Endless OS, and possibly in future Ubuntu Core Desktop as examples of modern systems (or systems in development) that make use of traditional packages as the building blocks of the base OS, and then lean on application distribution methods like Flatpak or Snap to provide desktop software. Use of the distro package manager for software like Blender is explicitly discouraged by all of these.
Distro specific fixes and configurations shouldn’t be necessary as long as the OS provides what the application platform needs (desktop portals, audio server, display server, print server, message bus, etc) Flatpak doesn’t even prevent distro specific repositories if it’s really necessary either; Fedora ships with their own Flatpak repository in addition to Flathub.
You want better control of or isolated and relocatable end-user software installation, and it already exists - it’s just not being done at the traditional package manager level, and I haven’t heard about any development effort going towards changing that.