The current Linux systems take the application vendor and pull it out of the picture almost entirely. There are few who could solve this, many who complain, and even more who don't understand or want to accept this fact and the damage it causes to linux.  The best positioned to actually solve this problem is, IMO, the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox.

What is the solution ? You need an application that will allow the user to go to a web page, or a local directory - like cdrom - and look for an installable application - in .tgz, .rpm, .deb or .xpi format.  Then it  needs to  download the app ( dealing with proxies,  retries, etc - like the downloader does in firefox ), and provide a simple interface to allow the user to choose if he wants a local installation or a system one. In the first case - install the app in some $HOME/Applications dir, the second - ask for root password and install it in the root filesystem. It should also register the web site with the upload manager ( like it does for .xpi extensions ) and register the files in the system database if it's a system application. Well, I just described Firefox - with maybe a simple extension or two.

What is essential for this to succeed is one organization that is neutral enough and trusted enough by end users. It needs to be willing to work with multiple existing package formats instead of trying to invent it's own. 

I don't see how this could be done without using the browser, and some of the concepts that are already at use in Firefox.  So maybe  Asa  could  actually do something about it, instead of just complaining :-). The technical aspects of this are actually easy - most of the problems already have solutions, and have been tried and validated. This is not a technical issue, and it never was - it's a matter of politics and marketing and ego and trust and interests. One nice thing is that this doesn't have to be accepted by any distribution ( they are too invested in their current solutions ), it's something that would only require the user to install firefox, an 'Application Manager' extension, and then support multiple distributions and vendors.

Of course, there is still an issue of compat libraries - but this is also easy to solve in many cases. A 'compat' package - maybe based on linux standard base - plus some distro-specific workarounds would allow enough of a baseline for application vendors to use. If users - and application vendors - accept this idea, Linux desktop can succeed, despite distribution's oposition.