This same quality may be part of why it has never gained significant traction though, the proliferation of components and resulting fragmentation have made it a difficult target for application developers. Oh, sure, FOSS applications work fine... because they're open source and rely on unpaid third parties to integrate them into whatever absurdly interdependent ecosystem (a.k.a "distro") you happen to be using. Well, for some definitions of "fine", since they're often out of date, sometimes altered, or otherwise not packaged at all.

It also makes troubleshooting a lot more difficult, since any efforts to find solutions will invariably land me in posts primarily about some other combination of components and it's up to me to sort out their relevance to my issue.