Arguably, Clementine is a counterexample to your argument. Many years ago, the Amarok music player was very popular on Linux; I used it extensively, as did man

Arguably, Clementine is a counterexample to your argument. Many years ago, the Amarok music player was very popular on Linux; I used it extensively, as did many people I know, even though none of us used KDE (the desktop environment on which it was built). Then, the Amarok developers decided to revamp the project for version 2; using newer technologies, removing bit-rotten code (apparently, due to the large userbase, there were many "drive-by patches" from one-time contributors, who were never heard from again) and, most significantly, completely rethinking the UI. If you dig around a little, you can find a lot of documents following this process, e.g. from the (now defunct) Amarok blog https://amarok.kde.org/blog https://amarok.kde.org/blog The result? The snazzy, powerful new music player known as Amarok 2 https://amarok.kde.org https://amarok.kde.org Yet, a huge number (most?) users abandoned it, the Amarok 1 codebase was forked and renamed to Clementine, and years later this "horrible" music player is still going strong; so much that it appears on the front page of Hacker News. Personally, I tried Amarok 2 for a while, but never really liked it. These days I use cmus ( https://cmus.github.io https://cmus.github.io ) but my non-technical partner prefers Clementine. The only problem we've had with it is trying to use a RaspberryPi as a file server; building the player's database over a networked filesystem is painfully slow. It would be nice if there were some way to create the DB on the RaspberryPi and send it over to the machine running Clementine; but I've since been looking into Beets and MPD.