The "less fragmented" past you describe is not the past I remember. Back on those days you have WindowMaker, Enlightenment, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Sawfish and many more. All window managers where a choice apart from Gnome, Kde, FXCE or mixed with desktop environments. Corel Linux had their own Kde mod. Many distribution had their own administration tools and desktop environments had different settings and look and feel: Suse, Mandrake, Turbolinux, Yggdrassil, Stormlinux.
I would also like to mention Slackware and Stampede Linux, just because...
I'm not your parent commenter, but I think fragmentation mentioned is at lower level. Back then I could just install base system (few megabytes) and freely choose wms, panels, login managers, etc to build my desktop. Now I hardly can setup sound and x modes without installing e.g. gnome that pulls all the dependencies and initial settings. Lots of userspace modules now exist to make work things that worked out of box before. Dbus, pulseaudio, hal, etc. It is not unix-like anymore, it is bunch of poorly built osx-es on top of technology, that is half-functional unless magically tuned via Desktop Environment (r)(tm). Distro hell only made it slightly worse.
Some distros where more or less tied to a desktop environment on those days "a la Ubuntu" and some other offered the choice during installation or after. I have been using netinstall for my Debian machines for more than 8 years and I can do what you are talking about.
Debian has had flavoured CDs for long time ago.
Is not the first time a read somebody complain about lack of choice but unknowingly is only trying or using Ubuntu (not Kubuntu nor Xubuntu).
May be in latest years Ubuntu has messed up a bit the percepction of Linux Desktop, but Linux Desktop is as healthy and fragmented as always.
Funny thing, I'm from '00 and never touched Ubuntu. Debian (2005), FreeBSD (2007) usually. And yeah, netinst, only needed things, so it's not my noob-experience. But now I can't make it work because... idk. This state, 'idk', was not even imaginable in old linux, because you opened the handbook/reference and solved it. Now I fail to do this, because there are so many layers that are out of control of core system developers, and it's all about gnome/kde/xfce/craphaldbuspulsed/etc. Recently installed xfce-debian showed me a page of cryptic mounts (systemd's job, right?). Even osx is not a monster anymore vs this crazy thing.
And there is a probability that I'm also able to do all that on your box. Not sure about mine.
