That is an unfortunate, probably unavoidable, byproduct of the freedom that brought Linux on so many computers, platforms and users. Everyone can write a software, or fork an existing one, nobody enforces a standard for development or integration. I guess it's not easy to build a giant free community around a free software and keep consistency. It's a mess, and has been a necessary one when the aim was to spread Linux as much as possible, but now we're paying the consequences. (Which is why I believe the day Microsoft will reveal their Linux distro, bringing stability and unification behind a known brand, is the day all non technical die-hard users and more importantly most commercial entities that use Linux will abandon the usual distributions, essentially killing them.) Haiku however was born as a clone of a closed system, and only recently is seeing some media coverage; there's no guarantee that, should it one day reach Linux' level of popularity, the influx of developers , users, and demand for more software, won't create the same issues there as well.

People love to bash linux for this and they are right. The single feature that makes linux historically suck on the desktop is the one reason it succeeded everywhere else.