Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just

Those pieces can all be separated, but increasingly few people seem to be interested in putting in the work to do it. In particular, freedesktop is mostly just a set of standards for common protocols and file formats for an open source desktop -- I doubt anyone wants to get rid of that stuff just to have their applications all break.