I watched a pretty old Q&A with Linus, and he called out distros for breaking "app space" all the time as the main reason why the Linux Desktop hasn't happened. I think he's definitely identified one of the bigger issues (but not all of them).

NixOS, by accident or intention, inherently circumvents this problem. It also has actual non-existent UX: you need to manage your own home-manager configs (for now, I want to change that). The maintainers have put good effort into being able to express tons of preferences in your nixfile (to the degree of Firefox plugins).

You may get nerdsniped by it.