In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
No. It's a problem, if you as distro maker support non-technical consumers as well.
Imagine troubleshooting Windows but you also have to figure out which DE, WM, libraries the user updated and so on.
> desktop side flatpak resolves many issues
You mean AppImage, Snap, etc.
And if there was such a nightmare to create a distro, how come there are so many?
If a free Linux distribution is more successful, its resources don't scale accordingly.
Predation: win-lose
Competition: lose-lose
This is how dynamically coupled systems work.
Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).
Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.