Synaptic Not a lot of people have common sense these days to understand that some packages would be unofficial and not supported by Solus team. ... But I also understand your point of view, personally would love to see a way to add third party repos like it’s on Ubuntu, but I’m pretty sure it would be a bad idea (probably).
The problem with unofficial third-party repositories is that without vetting, there is no telling what you are getting.
Packages in the Solus official repositories have been vetted -- that is, reviewed and tested -- so users have a reasonable expectation that the packages will not break things or contain malware, That is not true of packages from unvetted third-party repositories. What you get is what you get.
How high is the risk from installing packages from unvetted third-party repositories? It is hard to quantify. But the risk is not insignificant.
Ubuntu recognizes that, I believe. As far as I know, Ubuntu does not mindlessly mix unvetted packages in with vetted packages, and gives fair warning about the risks of using unofficial repositories.**
Warnings about unvetted packages are important, particularly in the case of Solus, which is an independent OS and requires some skill to package. An inexperienced packager could easily make a mistake that would tangle up the system, and without vetting, the mistake would not be caught pre-installation. It is hard enough for the team to keep things vetted (any reader of this forum is aware that updated packages sometimes cause problems even with vetting), but a reasonable attempt is made to catch and resolve problems before something goes into the repository.
Incompetent package development/vetting are a baseline, but the issues with unvetted third-party repositories do not stop with incompetence. I think that most experienced Linux users are aware of the University of Minnesota scandal a few years ago, when kernel contributors from the University deliberately inserted buggy code into the kernel as an academic experiment. That incident was relatively benign, but most of us know that malicious packages abound, and sneak through. Vetting is not a cure-all, but not vetting is an open invitation.
In the end, it comes down to trust and common sense. I spent my career in an enterprise-level IT environment, and I am more cautious than most as a result of my experience. I am careful to use only packages from major developers after personal reputation review, and to obtain those packages only from trusted sources. I have used third-party repositories on occasion (for example, when testing UB, I added the Microsoft Edge stable repository to UB), but have been careful in that regard.
As far as I know, nothing stands in the way of a Solus user adding a third-party repository, local or internet-based. But I think that it would be a mistake for Solus to encourage (actively or not) use of unvetted packages by including unvetted third-party packages in the Solus repository or by creating an official method to add unvetted third-party repositories. I realize that others may have different opinions about the issue.
With respect to this thread (and similar recent threads), we have been around this track before, I might add (see, in particular, comments starting with #6). I encourage the team to continue the present policies/practices/safeguards.
===================
** Although I tested Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 LTS, I haven't used Ubuntu since 2016, so things might have changed. But if memory serves, Ubuntu does not include unvetted third-party repositories in the installed build, but instead requires users to take affirmative steps to install third-party repositories, and includes an appropriate warning (as I remember, something along the lines of "Third-party software repositories are not checked for security or reliability by Ubuntu members, and may contain software which is harmful to your computer.") It seems to me that Ubuntu's warning is a bare minimum.
