I agree with your final point, if the Royal they that are making these distributions could settle on a common standard or some least common denominator, then the small software shops of the world could Target Linux without having to do 12 hours of research on how many flavors of desktop environments there are and how many flavors of compositors on top of them there are, and how many flavors of distributions have what desktop environments.
The current state has the effect of so much fragmenting what you can deploy to where that most people throw their hands up in frustration and say they are not deploying to Linux at all, Linux can deal with a web interface.
only the biggest software companies can afford to write a gtk / QT UI and ship as a RPM / Deb / apt package / tar.gz
The wild part is no one seems to care that this great app fragmentation occurs. There is no equivalent of an EXE on Lenox, as the elf file is treated differently depending on the distribution.
The flat pack vs snap war indicates that app distribution also hasn't been solved. Windows has wix installer or install shield, Mac has .DMG, but Linux does not have a unified strategy for the common user tasks of installing software, running software, or managing your installed software.
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I agree with your final point, if the Royal they that are making these distributions could settle on a common standard or some least common denominator, then the small software shops of the world could Target Linux without having to do 12 hours of research on how many flavors of desktop environments there are and how many flavors of compositors on top of them there are, and how many flavors of distributions have what desktop environments.
The current state has the effect of so much fragmenting what you can deploy to where that most people throw their hands up in frustration and say they are not deploying to Linux at all, Linux can deal with a web interface.
only the biggest software companies can afford to write a gtk / QT UI and ship as a RPM / Deb / apt package / tar.gz
The wild part is no one seems to care that this great app fragmentation occurs. There is no equivalent of an EXE on Lenox, as the elf file is treated differently depending on the distribution.
The flat pack vs snap war indicates that app distribution also hasn't been solved. Windows has wix installer or install shield, Mac has .DMG, but Linux does not have a unified strategy for the common user tasks of installing software, running software, or managing your installed software.