twice this year I've had to spend an hour or more with a user because a mirror was down. that's one more time than I've had to deal with a GitHub packages outage this year.

the latest was yesterday. they chose another pool of mirrors and the mirror continually chosen from that pool was down as well. finally I manually checked a mirror, made sure it was up and that signatures matched, then gave them that specific hostname.

the Linux package distribution system is not better. it's just different.

anonymous stuff on GitHub is usually limited to 60 requests per hour per ip address. if you're authenticated, it's several hundred if not several thousand.