The monoculture of meritocracy

But at the same time, what if they're right, and that their own stuff works better with the rest of their integrated software? The point on PAM is well-taken (although my Linux system uses it as well) but being old design doesn't inherently mean it's broken.

You mention being a Debian Developer, I can only assume that Debian would not take it well if e.g. Ubuntu were to switch to using RPM and try to coerce Debian to make the switch as well "because that's how everyone is doing it". And there would be dozens upon dozens of *good reasons* why Debian would not want to switch (backward compatibility, mounds of existing software written against apt, much of which would have to be ported, all of the various *.debian.org services which would need to at least be reviewed, if not modified, etc.)

Even *just in Linux* it has been prudent for us in KDE to avoid tying directly to low-level libraries. Konqueror can now use WebKit in addition to KHTML, Phonon let us transition nicely to PulseAudio for those who use it even though gstreamer-0.10 was current when KDE 4 was released, Solid has helped us survive the HAL/udev/u{disks,power} insanity, we have an authorization framework which has survived PolicyKit and both of its successors, etc.

It is easy to require very low-level dependencies when all you really have to worry about is making sure that Fedora and RHEL still end up working in time for the release. This isn't to say that we at KDE don't want to have very good support for such libraries when present, just that our policy on such libraries so far has actually worked very well for us.