You phrase this as if it's getting continually worse, but I'm not sure if distros were ever that interoperable (unless you deliberately restrict yourself to a p

You phrase this as if it's getting continually worse, but I'm not sure if distros were ever that interoperable (unless you deliberately restrict yourself to a point in time where there was exactly 1 distro). If anything it seems to me that you now have a decent chance to get software to run on any recent distro, which wasn't always the case. Though that's just my impression, I'd be happy to be proven wrong by someone better informed.