Because almost certainly someone out there will want to use it. And they should be able to, because that is the entire point of free software: user freedom.
People who are complaining would prefer a world of isolated apps downloaded from signed stores, but Linux was born at an optimistic time when the goal was software that cooperate and form a system, and which distribution does not depend on a central trusted platform.
I do not believe that there is any real technical issue discussed here, just drastically different goals.
Even if we ship as source, even if the user has the skills to build it, even if the make file supports every version of the kernel, plus all other material variety, plus who knows how many dependencies, what exactly am I supposed to do when a user reports;
"I followed your instructions and it doesn't run".
Linux Desktop fails because it's not 1 thing, it's 100 things. And to get anything to run reliably on 95 of them you need to be extremely competent.
Distribution as source fails because there are too many unknown, and dependent parts.
Distribution as binary containers (Docker et al) are popular because it gives the app a fighting chance. While at the same time being a really ugly hack.
I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just statically link everything wherever possible. These days I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong for users.
People don’t seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable, so long as it actually works.
If you don’t want to configure this manually, use distrobox, which is a nice shell script wrapper that helps you set things up so graphical desktop apps just work.
I've had so much trouble with package managers that I'm not even sure they are a good idea to begin with.
That was what most well packaged proprietary software used to do when installing into /opt.
