Ooohhh.

I still remember the time when I bought Acer netbook with pre-installed ubuntu.

It worked. Exactly for one day, before I accepted Ubuntu update, that broke my pc, because of some binary graphic driver.

I had to do some kernel magic to get it working again. On a pc with pre-installed Ubuntu, on day two. I wasn't very happy with that.

For all practical purposes, desktop Linux is a single target. Use Qt, statically link everything or install to a folder in /opt, and then the only thing you depend on from the OS is libc... which has been plenty stable for a very long time.

That helps with compatibility, but it does not help deployment. Flatpack-like projects try to solve this, but there won't be a "good" way of targeting linux until one of those solutions is widespread enough that you can just show 3 download links on your page (windows, linux, os x) and it all just works.

As a developer I have zero interest in trying to get my application into the package managers of various distributions,

Um, what? Phones differ in size and power, but a particular version of Android is a particular version of Android everywhere.

Android developers don't have a debian vs. ubuntu vs. centos. vs. gentoo vs. arch type choice to make, only a "how backwards compatible do I want to be" choice.

Why do you think desktop applications have to be different for the distros?

It is rather easy to ship libraries with your package or even do static builds..

Even without that, things are relatively portable. (Steam packaged for Ubuntu works on most of the distros)

Libraries are just part of the picture, then comes the location of files, init systems, lack of standard frameworks for all layers of a modern desktop.

On OS X, in spite of CUPS, I can use AppKit Printing API. On Linux I have to resort to somehow generate PS and forward into the printer driver.

Yes. Of the two problems (apis and deployment) apis is actually the easier problem. It's not solved by any means (OS services are just too dang hard to figure out because desktop linux isn't one OS. How do I do desktop notification, printing, service init etc in a way that works for all distros?) but at least that's doable.

The deployment is the hard problem imho.

Android took linux and solved the problems: it created an ivory-tower set of API's for applications and it provided an app distribution model that isn't insane.