I think we are at the end of the Fragmentation Era. It use to be that different distros were so different that you would get only specific versions of software

I think we are at the end of the Fragmentation Era. It use to be that different distros were so different that you would get only specific versions of software and you couldn't get the newest version of OpenOffice on X but with Y. The main Desktop distros are all fairly equal now. Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE (My favorite), and Fedora are all fairly straight forward and ready to be used and abused. Arch Linux goes out of their way to just make it hard but that has even stopped, heck their community has changed drastically over the past five years. I still use it on my ancient machines (32 bit is dying though). I want to install just about anything I can do OpenSUSE's one click or the SUSE build service, go through the pain of PPA or Fedora's flavor of the year installer of outside packages. In Arch you have AUR. It is vastly different then the way it was just 8 years ago or the way Slackware currently is made. Heck even the RPM vs DEB stupidity is mostly over. I think it has been over a year since someone said I don't do RPM based systems due to dependency hell which was just a issue from 10 years ago that got fixed but that stupid line kept getting repeated all the time!!!! I always told them build a DEB and an RPM and you will see why this is an non-issue.