Good news

By the way, the problem is not fragmentation per se, but lack of coordination of the fragments. Take for instance the Linux kernel. There's plenty of fragmentation: so many kernel trees (developer's, vendor's, maintainers's, embedders's...) yet they all are coordinated (more or less), because there exists a canonical tree that's aimed at by everyone.

So, it can be that fragmentation allows to test interesting things (fixed release schedules, rolling releases, source-released systems, build-from-scratch, etc). That is a Good Thing(TM), but it's incomplete because distros do not ultimately target to be integrated into a canonical one.

I think that was the vision for Debian. Thus it could be argued that the only fragmentation that's really bad is the debian/redhat divide. Mint and (to a lesser extent) Ubuntu are doing the right thing, IMHO. But Redhat is out there making millions, and you cannot really argue with that, so we are stuck.