"I've used a number of distros, but I've never used a free one where you didn't choose what mirror you wanted as part of the installation process, except perhaps Ubuntu which simply defaults to Canonical's own servers."
On the RPM side of the pond (CentOS/Fedora) I've never had an option to choose mirrors, you can provide a URL for a net install, but for the package manager, it goes off and gets a list of mirrors that are all over the place. As far as I'm concerned, untrusted = not in the control of the distro itself - i.e. any rogue admin can replace packages. But as I say, that's not a problem because packages are signed and checked after downloading.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
