TL;DR: Stop making "Desktop Linux" a moving target by agreeing on a minimal baseline that third-party application can take for granted to exist on each Desktop Linux system. To make "Desktop Linux" a viable platform (as in: Windows, macOS) to develop against, we need to insist on backward compatibility and either need to find the "least common denominator" by experimentation (as we have done for over a decade now), or get the main Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, etc.) to agree on a certain set of infrastructure that can be expected to be "there", in a consistant way, without unnecessary differences. A guaranteed minimal set of infrastructure (available in the default installation of all distributions) with guaranteed backward compatibility is required for "Desktop Linux" to become viable as a platform.