I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison.

Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.